Like traditional communications, Internet strategy is about figuring out who you want to reach, what the right message is, and how you're going to communicate it. But the web isn't just a one-way channel - it's a participative space. Communicating on the Internet is really about engagement, about getting people involved. If you do it right, people will become advocates for your message and they'll start promoting it themselves!
Here's four good reasons for thinking carefully about your Internet Strategy:
1. Constant access - to key information and interaction with all stakeholders that can get online, with no mailing or printing costs. That's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year potentially. It doesn't matter where your stakeholders are, or what time zone they are in, they can still get acess.
2. Cost effective - nearly everyone can create and maintain a dynamic online presence for nothing, no matter where you are in the world. Email is also almost free.
3. Flexible - unlike print communications, you can update your online information in a flash from anywhere, anytime. Even from your mobile phone. We'll show you how. You can also be anonymous.
4. Dialogue & collaboration - you can engage your stakeholders in important conversations that bring you closer together and increase understanding. Including local / global media and policy makers!
Important!
Online and traditional communications should work together. So include your URL on everything! Leaflets, t-shirts, posters and other publications. If you organise a meeting, make sure banners include your web address. Even your recorded messages. Infact one simple campaign idea is just to put a campaign URL all over the place on stickers, graffiti art or chalk. The medium really can become the message!
Where to next?
Read the introduction to the Internet section to get an overview of where to go next.
Email marketing is also an important part of your e-campaigning strategy (http://fairsay.com/blog/archive/2008/05/07/top-four-essentials-of-ecampaigning for more on e campaigning). This will probably be your main way of telling supporters about news and actions. You should always be thinking about how to grow your email list, whether online, through an easy sign-up box on your site or offline, like collecting email addresses at an event.
Use email tools that allow you to track the open and response rates of your emails, so you can see the % of people taking action and test ways to increase that. One of the critical stats is how many people forwarded your email to friends - this is one way a campaign can go viral. For an example of effective email marketing / campaigning across different languages and cultures, see Avaaz.
Check out our email marketing section to find out how to:
Virals are an established part of online marketing. Viral marketing usually refers to forwarding messages or links via email, so it runs the risk of becoming a bit like spam. But you can reach so many people this way that it's a good tactic when sheer numbers are important.
One of the most common forms of viral marketing to drive traffic to your website is a video that is funny or shocking. As well as creating the video you will need to spend a lot of time seeding it, that is, putting links to the video on all sorts of relevant sites and discussion forums. Be prepared for a low percentage of sign-ups - it's not uncommon to get 10,000 viral video views and less than 100 people signing up to your campaign as a result.
You can learn more about creating and distributing videos in the video section of this toolkit - this includes material on where you can host your video online.
YouTube is the most popular place to host your videos so it's a good idea to set up your own channel. However, there are some problems with YouTube; it can be hard to link people back to your site, and YouTube have used their Terms of Service to remove campaigning videos like those of Wael Abbas in Egypt, also in some places YouTube is often blocked. So investigate alternatives and look at specialist sites like the Witness Hub and alternatives like Ourmedia or BlipTv.
Simple online games are another good way to generate traffic from something that people will share with their friends.
However, the true essence of a viral is something that people will feel motivated to share, and this need not depend on fancy video or flashy games. Some of the earliest viral emails were simple email communiques from the Zapatistas during their uprising against the North American Free Trade Agreement in early 1993. These were simple communiques, straight from the source, but they served as an alternative information source when information direct from the activists themselves was extremely hard to find.
Whilst traditional media – such as radio, TV, newspapers and magazines - can still be useful for promoting campaigns and websites in some environments. You should also consider marketing your message by going where people already spend time - online.
Vast numbers of people are using blogs, social networks, photo and video sharing sites, and these are important marketing and engagement tools. Building your buzz in these spaces is a good way to recruit advocates to your cause.
Getting the right bloggers to write about your campaigns (blog outreach) is a good way to reach interested people. So if you're working in human rights, you could start by contacting these human right bloggers.
Build traffic and search rankings by exchanging links with relevant blogs and other sites, and remember that a personal request works best.
A good way to start is by commenting on other blogs that are writing about your topics. It's also a good idea to have a blog as part of your site; it's an easy way to keep the content fresh and the site alive.
Learn what kind of blog posts will attract traffic - sometimes it's a simple as using the right headline. No one knows for sure which blog posts will attract traffic, although there are many different opinions. The main thing is to develop an authentic voice, and monitor your web stats to learn what your audience like.
Go indepth with our Websites & Blogs section.
[Emphasis box ]
Have your read our Message in-a-box Strategy Overview yet? Make sure your online marketing fits with your goals, audience, situation and messages. Go there
first and save your valuable time and resources.
People are getting used to subscribing to RSS feeds (an easy way of keeping track of changes to your favourite websites) from websites and blogs as a way to keep in touch with new content and headlines. The trick with RSS is that the news comes to the user in their feed reader, rather than them having to visit each side separately. So make sure your site is putting out RSS feeds - most content management systems will do this as a standard feature, and all blog services will have RSS feeds.
If you use something else for your website, you may need some technical help to add them by hand. RSS is also a way to syndicate your content to other sites, allowing them to easily pull in your headlines, which is a good way to promote your content automatically and have it appear on their site as featured content. Other sites use RSS to aggregate news making it easy for people to keep up with the issues that interest them. Think about how you can make your information or data shareable and make it available through RSS so that others can use it for mash-ups, where people take data from two or more sources and combine them in a way that adds something new, like these examples from Kenya and Zimbabwe.
You can use social networks to build a list of 'friends' who you can message in a similar way to email and promote your website. Social networks also have a viral aspect where people sign-up to your cause because they've seen it appear in a friend's newsfeed or on their profile. You can make it easy to sign up by adding links to your Facebook, Myspace, Bebo or other social networking profiles on to your website homepage. Social networks work best when you put a lot of time in to them; sending messages, responding to friend requests, commenting on other people's profiles. They are informal social spaces, so the more personal & friendly you can be, the better. People in social networks will tend to ignore corporate communications. Think carefully about who you are trying to attract using social networking sites, in some societies social networking sites are mostly used by a younger audience, however social networking sites are increasingly gaining popularity with different communities, i.e some with younger users and some with older users.
It's important to appreciate that different cultures use different social networks in different ways. The majority of Orkut members are in Brazil, and it is also popular in India. China has QQ , Japan has Mixi and Cyworld originated in South Korea. Youth in Kosova and the Kosovan diaspora use Hi5 rather than MySpace or Bebo. Across the Middle East the picture seems varied; while there are Iranian MySpace pages with thousands of friends, Saudi Arabians seem keener on Orkut, and there are MySpace look-alikes like MuslimSpace.
Other types of social networking sites include voting sites like Digg and Stumbleupon. If enough people have rated your content on one of these it can lead to big spikes in traffic to your site. So an alternative method of online promotion is to encourage your supporters to vote for your stories.
Twitter is emerging as an important tool for online promotion. It's hard to describe Twitter well, except as a mixture of micro-blogging (160 characters per entry as in mobile phone text messages) and social networking. It works across the web and with mobile phones and feels 'live'. People are using Twitter to share interesting content, especially to respond to things that are happening at that moment or to share snippets of and links to interesting articles and blog posts. People are using Twitter to share interesting content, especially to respond to things that are happening at that moment, like Egyptian activists twittering about arrests.
The social web changes the whole marketing game by making it participative. You're don't just want to get people interested, you want to get them involved. At the very least, encourage people to bookmark your site in social bookmarking services like delicious. Give them opportunities to rate, vote and comment on your content, whether that's on your site or elsewhere. Create fan communities in the social networking spaces and encourage your friends to promote your cause. Online marketing can be a good place to experiment with user generated content. Need a logo? Ask your users to upload designs. This pattern can be applied to campaigns themselves. At the most fundamental end this can become a process of open innovation, where you are using the web to open up your campaign to become the collective endeavour of you and your supporters.
How can you see if all your social marketing is working? One way is through buzz monitoring i.e. trying to track how and where people are talking about your campaign. A simple tool that you can use for free is Google Alerts. You can set this up through going to the main google website and specifying which key words you want it to alert you about when they are used on a website. Google Alerts then emails you when these keywords are mentioned in online media & blogs. One tip to bear in mind though is that you may want to make sure these keywords are very specific otherwise you will get a lot of email from Google Alerts that won't allow you to track your particular campaign or issue. You can track blog mentions via Technorati & tools like Blogpulse and there are now some great tools for Twitter.
The mantra of online marketing is 'measure everything'. Whereas real world impact can be very tricky to measure, the nature of the internet makes it easy to track and count things, whether it's the number of visitors to your website or the % of your email list who take an action. You can use this to help your reporting and accountability to funders or whoever. But the main use of metrics should be an ongoing evaluation of your tactics. Is your homepage feature encouraging people to sign-up to your newsletter? Who are the main referrers to your website and what are the most popular search terms? Is your email subject line increasing the number of people who open them? For your site, the main tool will probably be Google Analytics, a free tool which provides a lot of detail on your web site statistics (you may need some help installing this). For email marketing, whichever email tool you choose. And for the social networks you'll largely be relying on the sites you can get from them, such as number of friends, number of comments, and number of video views. Make sure you plan for and spend time to regularly review these statistics they will tell you a lot about who is using your site, where they are coming from to reach your site and what they are looking at. These facts will not only help you understand who you are reaching right now, but should also help you plan for the future. The web promises what traditional PR & marketing never could - the possibility of measuring engagement.
Now you've created your website you need to make sure people are looking at it! Search engine optimization is the process of ensuring that your Web pages are accessible to search engines and are built in the right way to help them improve the chances that they will be found.
The best way to get people to your website is through a search engine such as Google. Search engines enable people to find what they are looking for on the World Wide Web by typing a keyword or phrase into a search field. The search engine will match the keyword search query to the websites listed in its index and return a list of websites that are most relevant.
Search engines work in a variety of ways and each has a different logic. The world's leading search engine – Google – is a crawler based search engine which means that it 'crawls' the internet collecting keywords and references and people then search what it finds. Google then uses a complicated set of criteria to decide where sites come in their listings. The most significant of these is whether your site is linked to by other sites – see the section on linking strategies for more information on this. Other criteria are whether the search term appear in your in your domain name; in your title and description tags; in your headings; or elsewhere in the text of your page.
Whilst Google is the most popular search engine, it is worth remembering that there are lots of other search engines like Yahoo and Altavista and these use different logics. For example, other search engines – such as the Open Directory project are 'human powered' and take submissions from individuals and also have entries created by editors.
This section covers ways that you can improve the chances of your content being found through search engines. As different search engines have different logics for how they prioritise webpages it's useful to know how they work and what to focus on. It's always worth remembering that there are ways of buying placement on search engines like Google, but for most NGOs it's better to try and optimise your website so that your site gets placed higher up in the rankings without you having to do this.
If your organisation's website it being built by an outside contractor they may attempt to charge you extra for search engine optimisation however it won't take you long to submit your site to the main search engines. Building your organisations linking strategy requires specialist knowledge of your field, so as an insider you are probably best placed to do this.
You can submit your site to search engines at the following web addresses;
Metadata is a set of tags used to describe a web page. It provides information such as page author, creation date, what the page is about and which keywords represent the page's content. A web browser does not display metadata but the machines accessing the page can access and efficiently record data from it. Many search engines use metadata for the creation of their indexes.
Make sure each of the pages of your site contain the following
Title tag
This is the text that appears on web page title bars and search engine results pages. This should be about 60-80 characters.
Description
This is the short line of text that is displayed in the search results of most search engines. This shouldn't be more than 100-200 characters.
Keywords
Keywords and phrases need to be relevant to the content and separated by commas. Avoid repeating a keyword more than 3 times.
Alt tags
Including keywords in alt tags can help your search results.
Keywords - some words are better then others
Keywords are words that users enter into search engines to describe the information/service they are looking for. You should make sure that you find keywords for your site that are relevant to your organisation and the field you are working in – look through the online and offline content produced by your organisation to find inspiration for this.
You should be careful not to choose a lot of terms that are very generic as they may be a lot of websites out there using these terms and this may not help to make your content easily finable. Also you should ensure that you include words that are being used by your target audience in search engines – you can use website statistics to find this information.
There are some free tools out there to help you choose keywords;
Whether you create your organisation's site yourself or work with outside contractors you should aim to stick to the following guidelines;
Making your site accessible to a broad range of users – including those with disabilities – is not only good practice but can also improve your search engine listings and make your Web content more accessiblee to users in general.
The accessibility guidelines to follow are those created by the The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which you can read online at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/
There are many resources available online to help improve the accessibility of your site such as
http://wave.webaim.org/ which is a free web accessibility evaluation tool.
As well as optimising the way your website is programmed you should also ensure that your site is being linked to from other sites as this will boost your search rankings. In particular search engines are looking for links from reputable, high quality sites. If you want to find out how many sites are linking to your site just type link:www.yourwebsite.org into google. This will bring you back a page of details on who is linking to your site, you can use this to help identify organisations you already know that you could ask for links.
You can also try the following;
There is a lot of good information available on the internet, the following websites will help build your understanding of search engine optimisation.
http://www.idealware.org/articles/found_on_search_engines.php
A great article from Idealware – a leader in the NGO technology support field - which shows how “The content and structure of your website can have a dramatic effect on how easily potential constituents can find you via search engines.” Covers 10 steps that can help search engines find and prioritize your site content
http://www.idealware.org/articles/cms_for_seo.php
More information from Idealware on how to make sure the content management system used by your organisation to maintain your site is helping with your search engine optimisation.
http://seo.grassroots.org/guide
http://www.goodkeywords.com/
Good Keywords is a free Windows software for finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages.
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167921
An in depth guide to search engine optimisation from one of the leading sites in this field
http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/
This site offers inside knowledge on crawling and indexing issues and introduces offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.
The most accurate way to measure the success of your website is look at your website's statistics and study of the behaviour of website visitors. This is a really helpful way of working out what you are already doing right, and what you could do better. The tools you use to do this are called web analytic tools. There are various free tools available for doing this including Google Analytics.
The most important information to examine is the number of visitors or unique visitors since this figure gives the most accurate impression of a site's audience.
The site analytics will also show you Hits, however this number is misleading since it can overestimate the popularity of a site, because it counts the loading of every item on a page not the viewing of a page overall.
Other information which your website statistics will offer are as follows
Referring search engines
Details on which search engines delivered traffic to the website.
Referring keywords
Details on keyword phrases that were used to find your site. If people are using keywords to search for your site that you aren't using in your site content or metadata (the keywords you use to describe your webpage), then you could use this information to identify new keywords to include in your site in the future.
Unique monthly visits
It is good practice to monitor this on a monthly basis and measure it against the number of search engine referrals, so you know if your traffic is coming from people who knew your site already or were looking for something on a search engine.
Site paths (entry and exists)
This shows how many users entered a site per page and how many left per page. This is useful to check the effectiveness of high-ranking web pages. For example if a particular page on your website, such as your homepage,is used 100 times as an entry page for your site and only 10 users clicked beyond that page, 90% of the possible visitors were lost.
Let's start with the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO). Make your site search engine friendly because that'll be one of the main ways your site gets found. Think about relevant keywords that people will search for in order to find out about your issues. These keywords should appear in your site content, but also in meta-tags, page title tags and anchor text. Making your site accessible will make it more search engine friendly as well. Many of your visitors will come directly to a page of your site through a search result and will never have seen your homepage. So make each page work as as a landing page, and don't obsess about the homepage.
For more in-depth advice about search engine optimisation, see our dedicated section.