So because of my science background, when I think pinning– I don’t necessarily imagine the site, Pinterest. I think of entomology class when I was instructed to capture, pin and label insects. But alas, pinning doesn’t have to mean clumsily sticking a pin through the mesothorax. I’m now associating it with a vibrant and visual bookmarking service most often recognized as being populated with women collecting sites about weddings, babies, recipes or baby recipes (just kidding…I do not condone baby eating) .

Let’s just say, it’s much easier to “pin” things online than the experience I had in college. Not to mention that nonprofits and businesses alike are finding real reasons to start using Pinterest.

So what are you using Pinterest for?

I’m using it for the National Wildlife Federation because I’ve noticed how the interests of people online are becoming more and more visually inclined. You see how well images and pictures do on Facebook, well that translates nicely into Pinterest’s clean interface. Not to mention, in a very short time we saw a large increase in traffic and interaction surrounding our pinly presence.

Art and science are so intertwined. Pinterest is a fun place to explore visual collections while increasing sharing and interaction. Not to mention, thanks to our kids publications, we have a number of adorable wildlife crafts and recipes to share.

I also find it incredibly fun to search Pinterest for NWF mentions:
http://pinterest.com/source/nwf.org/ (adding source between the link gets you there quickly!)

Great Pinterest Resources:

Pinterest: A Tool To Curate Relevant Visual Content for Your Audience
Nonprofits on Pinterest
12 Ways Your Nonprofit Can Use Pinterest
Steal these 42 Creative Pinterest Ideas for Nonprofits

Are you pinning about wildlife, environment, technology or science?
I want to follow you! Let me know!

Then answer these questions:

1. What is your goal? Why are you blogging?
(Raise awareness, get petition signatures, etc. The more specific the better.)

2. How will you measure success?
(New visitors, page views, backlinks)

Now … Forget about your goals! Forget what you want readers to do and think only about your target audience.

3. Who is your audience? Activists? Parents? Teachers? Animal lovers? Spend some time researching your audience online. What are their concerns, needs, wants? What do they like to read/share online?

4. What are the concerns, needs, and secret desires of your target audience?

5. What do they like to share online? (Hint: Visit blogs who have already cultivated this audience)

Once you answer these questions, you can then dive into content creation! Here are some tips to get you on your way:

Brainstorm Compelling Content:
Certain formats and topics work best for blogs and make for irresistible content.

• Lists (5 Ways …)
• Photo galleries and short compelling videos
• Curation (Create a useful resource that also creates “friends” in the blogosphere: 6 Best Green Bloggers)
• Tips (4 Easy Birdhouse Crafts)
• Surprising personal stories
• Myth-busters
• Quizzes, polls

Only after you’ve got an outline for your post  … REVISIT YOUR GOALS FROM QUESTION ONE! How can you weave in your “ask” into the content?

Engage, engage, engage:
A blog should be a two-way conversation. Think about how and where you want your reader to engage. Maybe you just want them to answer a question  in the blog comments or on Facebook. You could even create a blog post from the answers. Let your readers do the work for you!

What other great tips do you have about writing blogs? We want to know!

With the addition of Google+ brand pages, I’ve noticed  a number of awesome  environmental, outdoor and wildlife brand pages. I couldn’t resist sharing them.

I decided I would create a useful Nature and Wildlife Circle on Google+  that includes many of the environmental groups you can follow. I’d love to aggregate a number of them, so if you’re on Google+ and I haven’t included you– please let me know by commenting with your page link below.

There are some fantastic blog posts out there that are discussing how nonprofits are using Google+ brand pages as well as how Google+ can improve the experience for brand managers. I think this is an exciting time to be a part of the community! So please join us and let’s bring the wildlife to Google+!.

I’ve insisted that the benefits for being early to a new site are to get a chance to talk to other curious, early-adopters. By joining now, it allows you to take the time to get to know the space and the etiquette that’s expected. It’s been interesting to spend time talking and commenting on Google+ while it’s still pretty empty and the conversations are still very meaningful. So join us now and let’s “hang out”!

I tackle new situations by:

• Listening
• Asking/Documenting Questions
• Experimenting
• Creating
• Assessing and Analyzing

I used this chart in a recent presentation to explain how I break down my time on social media.

I want to continue recording my experiences online and improve at capturing data so that others can learn quickly, what has taken me time to figure out.

I recently presented (the presentation below) to National Wildlife Federation’s social media users. It was a ton of information in a short time, but I’m hopeful that we can continue to tweak how we measure our success and map out future outreach and relationship building. I love that online allows us to connect with wildlife enthusiasts far and wide.

When you explore…what questions do you ask? How do you keep track of the information?

Change.org: Even from the homepage, Change.org encourages members to create petitions around issues they care about. Not only that, but if done well, the community may even promote your petition. In a few easy steps, you can create and promote your desired “change” to your contacts and other nonprofit organizations on the site and on social media.

What’s required: Change.org account
The Impact: Very easy to maneuver, and change.org has fantastic content as well, so sometimes it’s even possible to link your petition to content that’s available. The community is buzzing with social causes and if you can get your action featured in their newsletter you can see the impact.

Care2: There is so much a user can do on Care2, that you can forgetabout how simple it is to go to the petition site and create a place to collect signatures for the cause or campaign of your choosing. It’s very easy to get distracted, but there are many passionate users and good causes. You can even join like-minded groups and promote your petition that way!

What’s required: Care2 login
The Impact: Similar to Change.org, there’s a very active community that if you’re willing, you can get involved with and illicit their help and expertise.

Act.ly:
This site gives you a quick way to create an action campaign on Twitter.Take the person’s username and target your messaging in 140 characters. Then ask your supporters to re-tweet it and that serves as a signature. It takes very little time to set up but can have a huge impact. Especially if the user on the receiving end is an avid Twitter user!

What’s required: Twitter usernames
(both you need one and your target)
The Impact: May not be as impressive as calling your representative, but can be overwhelming to the person managing the Twitter account and can definitely build a movement over an important issue. It also takes no time to set up, which can be a definitely benefit for quick turn around campaigns!

Facebook Causes Petitions:
If you’re an administrator for a nonprofit or advocacy group and you’re looking to increase Facebook engagement as well as ask people to take action, I think experimenting with the petitions on Causes is a good step. In order to get a good idea how to create a petition, check out this helpful video.

What’s Required: Nonprofit Causes partner login.
The Impact: As a nonprofit you can leverage your communities on Causes to help petition on your behalf. The names are displayed in a way so that you can export them and hand them to the person you’re trying to target and can be very effective in spreading the word.

There’s also a FANTASTIC post by SocialBrite that lists a bunch of tools like iPetitions and Petitionspot I didn’t mention here. I highly recommend people check it out. If you’re someone who’s passionate about an issue and you don’t work for a nonprofit, I definitely recommend you use these petitions to get on the radar of people who do (me!).

A few weeks ago we had our first soil field trip and I was able to get more hands-on with a stream bed and some soil-y colleagues. We were each instructed to attempt to identify different horizons as well as the texture, color and structure of a small area of soil in Maryland.  It was mucky, interesting, and I felt like I was guessing a lot of the time. But in learning how to survey soil, I was reminded how similar it is to surveying social media and how each site offers different aspects with a unique function.

In soil, you determine physical properties by examining the:

• Structure: (type, size and grade)
• Texture: (percentage of sand, silt and clay)
• Porosity: (air and water space)
• Color: (hue, value and chroma of the soil)

It’s very easy, because soil scientists and people surveying  soil can reference any number of information sites and decide how to address the next step. But what if someone is curious about using social media? There’s no obvious key. People have to swim around in the social space and copy their competitors.

If we had to decide on how to determine the attributes of social media sites that we would need to survey I would say:

• Structure: Profiles, Groups, Pages
• Texture: Friendly, Intellectual or Marketing Heavy
• Intensity: How often must you check it? How much does it take to update it?
• Design: How user friendly is it?

Keeping in mind that I’ve only had a few moments to think about this,  I think sites like Twitter would be the topsoil and sites as built out as Ning would be the bedrock. But maybe I should just get back to studying…

As for the training session, we learned so much! I’m happy to share with anyone who is interested. Here is just a broad overview of what the training covered:

•    Professional mission statements and goal setting
•    Leadership skills and work-life balance
•    Successful campaigning skills
•    Communications and messaging strategies
•    Planning tools for advocacy campaigns
•    Adaptive management techniques
•    International biodiversity funding opportunities
•    Coordinated organizational response models
•    On-camera media training
•    Tools for dealing with conflict in the workplace
•    Fundraising Advice

While I think the environmental movement keeps getting stronger, it’s important we stick together and help one another. We can do that online, in person, and through special events and trainings. We must do this, I think it is imperative to our future.

On the tech side of this whole project, I’ve been playing more with Google Sites and figuring out how to make it a friendly, collaborative place to share documents and information.  It was very simple to select a template and then manipulate it to make it functional and relevant (bat photo).

Great collaboration tools so far:
1) Google Docs (both spreadsheet & docs)
2) Google Calendar
3) Skype
4) Google Sites

What tools have you used for group collaboration? I need recommendations!

I also use Google Reader to monitor NWF’s mentions and it was when Google first launched “Bundles” that I though perhaps this an excellent way for people sharing and trading information through blogs, sites and search terms they follow.

Google Bundles Allow for Easy Feed Sharing

What I found was really interesting! Google bundles are something that anyone with a Reader account can create, and they make sharing information about your organization, cause or focus much more accessible.

Here’s how you create a Google Bundle.

• Go to your Google Reader Account
• Click on Browse for Stuff (left-hand navigation)
• Once you click “create” you are set to start naming your bundle and dragging and dropping the feeds of your choice.

The real reason I’m telling you how to do this? So that you can help me compile a great list of nature blogs! I’ll add my public feeds here and please write your bundles in the comments and I’ll add them to my list.

My Google Bundles:

• Birding Blogs
• Animal Feeds
• Environmental Blogs
• Nature Photography
• Sustainable Gardening

What are your bundles? Share with us!

(If you don’t believe I really love feeds… here’s presentation from a recent webinar!)

Virginia State Parks Asks for ID

I like to share great examples of nonprofits using social media, and I get even more excited when people engage around wildlife.

I saw a great example in wildlife identification from Virgina State Parks on their Facebook page. They asked their friends to help them identify this bird–>

We’ve talked about the benefits of crowdsourcing, but more and more I’m seeing several benefits to asking the community great questions.

In case you haven’t read about Quora, this site has recently received some attention and it works similarly to Yahoo Answers or Aardvark. Since I’ve been curious about the growth of sites like these, I found this chart helpful for comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the Q&A networks. Both nonprofits and nature lovers could use it as a chance to answer and ask questions while building relationships.

And you know I’m all for that!

Who’s testing Quora out now? What do you think?

Yesterday I presented with a number of talented PR professionals at the Digital PR Summit in New York City.  It was a great experience and I learned so much from everyone there. Special thanks to my co- panelists, Johna Burke and Tim Marklein.

Here are my slides from the event:

I Heart New York City’s Wildlife
What I love about the city, besides the amazing energy that everyone talks about, is the fact that wildlife is ever present. I notice them slinking behind trash cans, climbing Central Park trees,  or weaving around your feet (pigeons). I find their adaptation to city-life fascinating. And where it’s lacking on the biodiversity, fragmented habitats and the animals that survive in them are still incredibly interesting to me.

If you live in a city and want to learn neat ways to get involved or ways to help the local wildlife, here are a few sites I recommend:

• Help Project Pigeon Watch
• Visit NYC Wildlife’s website
• Anything from Audubon in NY
• Good Ol’  Eel Watching (Just awesome)
• Check out the Out Walking the Dog blog for wildlife sightings in NYC

So yes, who thinks there isn’t any wildlife in NYC? I certainly know there is…and I also know those PR people can add the wild to life any day!