February Social Media Star: Chad Norman

The software world is known for being fast paced with companies popping up and dropping out every year, but Blackbaud, a software company working exclusively with non-profits has been around for 27 years, practically forever in tech years.

Chad Norman, the interactive communications manager at Blackbaud, has been a pioneer who’s extremely innovative in his use of social media to help keep his company connected, improve customer support and drive traffic.

We picked Chad as February’s social media star, because he has developed a mature social media program at Blackbaud that’s been incredibly successful and he’s constantly on the look-out for new tools and new ways to improve their program. Here’s what Chad had to say about social media:

What is your job/company/profession/title?
Currently, I’m the interactive communications manager at Blackbaud, the leading provider of technology for nonprofits.

What was the first social media technology you used?
OK, since I’m old, I can remember the BBS days, not to mention Classmates.com (boy, did they blow it!). In the modern era, probably MySpace and YouTube.

What is your favorite social media tool?
Twitter is by far my favorite social media platform, both from a professional and personal standpoint. Though SlideShare.net is a close second and is great for sharing knowledge and SEO. FourSquare is a great one that is up and coming.

How have you used social media for your business/company and how has it benefited?
Over the last two years, we’ve been using social media at Blackbaud to increase engagement, support customers, promote initiatives and thought leaders, and drive traffic to our various Web properties. We’ve definitely seen increased engagement and support – social media has allowed us to communicate in ways we never could before. We’ve probably seen the most benefits by using social media to promote and drive traffic. Our metrics are telling us that a double digit percentage of our traffic is arriving via social media, and that is a lot of growth for a B2B company like us.

How much time would you say you spend a day engaging social media?
Around one hour, and that includes everything like updating/tweeting, collecting metrics, reporting, and planning. Keep in mind that we have a mature program, and that early on more time was used. I always remind people that most of the time investment is up front (learning how the community works, developing a strategy, training staff, etc). Once it is integrated into your overall communications plan, you’ll find less and less time is required.

How do you incorporate it into your day so it’s not a time waster?
I do a couple things that help me save time on a daily basis. The first is to actually set aside time in the morning. 20 minutes on Monday to collect metrics, 10 minutes each day to write tweets, 30 minutes on Friday to recap the week, etc. Put those things on your actual calendar. Second, I try to use as many helpful tools as possible. Build a listening dashboard in iGoogle (rather than scouring the web manually), use Tweetdeck to manage your daily work flow (monitoring and responding), and roll out CoTweet to your staff (pre-write tweets, assign responses, etc).

What’s your best tip for using social media for business?
The best tip is to forget about the actual execution and focus on the bookends: Planning and Reporting. You must develop a strong strategic plan and stick to it. Your strategy will determine which tools to use, what to say and who should be saying it – not the other way around. On the back end, you need to collect metrics and actually analyze them. Don’t just count how many times you were retweeted – look at what was retweeted, and who passed it along. These collected metrics will also help you benchmark your efforts against other orgs and help you adjust your plan. Remember, you can’t just collect, you have to measure!

Is there a social media tool/technique that you think is underutilized that you would like people to know about?
Social media does wonders for search engine optimization, so I always tell clients to use anything that can help tell your story – because Google is listening. Do you give presentations? Load them on SlideShare.net. Do you take a lot of photos? Share them on Flickr. Does your audience hang on LinkedIn? Start a group to help them discuss things. All of those things will rank on page 1 for your business

Where can people find you online and via social media?
www.echohive.com/blog
www.gogreencharleston.org
www.twitter.com/chadnorman
www.facebook.com/chadnorman
www.slideshare.net/chadnorman