Background
Levees.Org is a not-for-profit grassroots organization founded by my mother and me in December, 2005, while we were exiled from New Orleans. Our mission is education that the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans was a man-made federal disaster, not a natural one. Today we have over 24,000 members and chapters in six states.
I have decided to share what we have learned in order to help other organizations and causes. It’s important to note that none of this requires a social media professional. Once everything is setup, the workflow is simple. (If you need proof, ask my mother! She’s been running our online presence for months now without any assistance from me.)
Top organic and referral traffic sources for Levees.Org over a certain period
Conquer Google
We control 8 of the 11 links on the first results page on Google for [levees.org]. How? Syndication is key.
- Syndicate content at all major video sites using TubeMogul.
- Syndicate Twitter and Blog feeds in as many places as possible, such as Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Plaxo and more.
- Cross post on other blogs. We do this on NOLA.com. (Bonus: these posts sometimes appear on Google as “news.”)
- Pay PRweb to publish press releases on various sites. (example)
Dominate YouTube
We used to host our own videos using a paid service. Big mistake. Now we host all of our videos for free on YouTube, where they can go viral. Consequently, YouTube is our #4 top website referrer, sending mostly new visitors.
Our primary goal is always to be featured on the YouTube top-100 lists. Here’s how we get there:
- We’re never shy about asking our members to login or create accounts at YouTube to rate, “favorite,” and comment on our video. We even use YouTube annotations over our video to point to the rate button. As a result, our videos are often featured as the highest rated or most commented-on videos.
- Whenever we upload a video, we immediately do a massive push to drive as much traffic as possible. We give our members a 24-hour timeframe to watch the video and send to their friends, and we even coordinate these efforts in advance with bloggers. As a result, we make it to the top-100 “viewed today” page more often than an organization our size should.
Levees.Org takes the #4 spot on YouTube News & Politics, competing with popular topics such as Palin, Obama, and the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit
Leverage Wikipedia
Most people don’t think of Wikipedia in their social media marketing efforts. They should.
Wikipedia is our #2 top traffic source and #1 referrer; nearly 5% of our traffic comes from Wikipedia. This is because our members have placed Levees.Org links under the external links section of relevant Wikipedia articles. Along with adding links to articles, we have spent time improving articles and interlinking related articles.
We’ve also created entirely new articles, such as Flood Control Act of 1965. It didn’t take much effort; the article started like this and was expanded by the community. In fact, we didn’t even add our link to that article; someone else did later on.
Levees.Org is listed as the first external link in many relevant Wikipedia articles. The YouTube link (#4) is to our video.
Rethink Conversion Goals
In 2005, all that mattered to us as far as social media was collecting e-mail addresses. We did a great job at this thanks to the help of Internet Marketing expert Ken McCarthy. However, eventually we realized (as Ken McCarthy finally has as well) that people aren’t using e-mail as their primary form of communication; many young people don’t seem to be using it at all. We now think of gaining Facebook and Twitter followers as important as collecting e-mail addresses.
We redesigned our website to focus on social media.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:00 am
Great blog post! Check your grammar in the first sentence, however – it should be “…founded by my mother and me.” You would never say “founded by I” so you can’t say “founded by someone else and I.”