JOHNETTE: Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us today for today's webinar presented by the national disability institutes real economic impact were titled, social media behind the scenes. I am Johnette Hartnett and the director at the national disability Institute. Today's webinar sponsored by our partners at Wal-Mart. I'd also like to thank our other sponsors Bank of America, or quarter therapeutics, and Institute for economic department and the wonderful partners, the IRS stakeholder partnership communication services. For those of you who may not know much about the national disability Institute, we are an national nonprofit organization based in Washington DC and our mission is to promote income preservation and asset development. We are working to build better archive on, make future for persons with disabilities. At the national disability Institute we support our mission with the variety of activities including our work with the Internal Revenue Service on the real economic impact were is the national partner movement in over 100 cities and its Main goal is to improve the economic lives of people with disabilities. And I'd also like to thank all of our sponsors for the opportunity to continue this work. The tour is in that it be and at the end of 2011, all of you who have helped us, we have served over 1 million taxpayers with disabilities with tax refunds of over $1 billion. So without I would like to turn it over to Nakia Matthews who to does the IT with NDI couple of technical items.
NAKIA: Good afternoon everyone. If you experience any technical difficulties during the webinar please send the message through the chat box or e-mail me at . We also have closed captioning available for participants who are deaf or hard of hearing or have English as the second language. You can close this window by minimizing it if you don't want to see it or you could make the multimedia window bigger by minimizing the chat were to invade Windows. During the presentation, it would be the PowerPoint to share the presenters desktop, you will receive close captioning on the right-hand side of your screen.
> This webinar is an open forum so if you have any questions during the presentation, type them into the chat or Q&A box to either me or Caroline Burke and will field the questions as they come in. If you are listening by phone and not locked into the webinar, you may also participate by e-mailing questions to me at . Please note that this webinar is being recorded and the material will be placed on the national disability Institute website at www.realeconomicimpact.org.
JOHNETTE: Thank you. If the great honor to introduce Kate Bradley and she is the virtual alphabet soup of radio stations where she's been acknowledging for setting audience , whistling and fund-raising records. And as music director of the loss at XM she has served about 20 million listeners and created and managed the first-ever XM newsletter. We are proud to have case as part of the economic impact to her. This is her third year assisting us with the social media component, particularly with the my free Texas campaign that we are doing. Welcome.
KATE: I'm so sorry, I have my mute button on. Thank you very much. I was talking to myself for like 30 seconds. So, we are going to start with ice a screen share. And Nakia, I'm going through some technical difficulties. I'm clicking the desktop and it's not letting me share anything. So I'm just -- there we go. Okay, now it's working. So, the goal today for all of you is to really take to look at the experience that defied us back to her has had over the past year with my free Texas campaign and the social media effort -- My Free Taxes, and how you can take the same ideas and benefit from them in your own programs which is sort of why we are focusing on this. There has been a lot of great success with My Free Taxes. So I wanted to quickly define what that is an add-on to little bit of what Jeanette said. It says, the free tax campaign is the national effort and the goal is to provide free tax help to individuals and families to qualify. It's sponsored by Wal-Mart and the tour is in partnership with one economy and United Way worldwide so if the wonderful collaboration between these three partners to get the word out about this incredible free service. Our goal is to target low and moderate income and there's also an national and to and to her that his staff with certified IRS volunteers as well as laptops to bring online access.
> And we also work with various centers and the REI tour provides accessibility of this free tax filing for people with disabilities. So that's the general overview of the partnership. And I know last year for sure, and it definitely this year, in this My Free Taxes campaign, it's because the overwhelming statistics that have been coming out as you may or may not know, we couldn't say no to this anymore. There was this question for many, which is, what is happening with the digital divide of? Is our audience out there using social media, and in fact, more and more the answer is overwhelmingly yes. So 54% of disability people are using the Internet. 41% of them have access at home which means they don't have to go to the library or somewhere else so they are using it very regularly. 44% of all Americans either text or check e-mail or the Internet on your phone, on your smartphone, which is important because smartphones have been becoming more mainstream at very high rate of about 10% each year. 90% of all Americans on any mobile phone, and 82% of those owners have our household income of less than $50,000. So that tells you there is that group. And older Americans, 55 and over, the fastest-growing segment of mobile phone users, which is interesting, because as you know, many baby boomers are aging and will be adding to the disability population as well. And the old way of thinking was that older Americans are not using this technology, but in fact, they really are.
> We know that low-income households are spending more time on the Internet than others, and part of that is because any of the stigma is that those folks might feel are gone. If the leveling ground in general for anyone on the Internet. So especially with people with disabilities and people who may not otherwise have access to information are able to find it and feel very come to you on the Internet, perhaps more so than in the past. And the mobile web meeting your phone is developing for-eight times as fast as the use of computers. So it's set to overtake the use of computers worldwide by 2014. The people who are using those phones to participate in social media on twitter and Facebook is overwhelming. 44% of twitter users use it from their phone and I , on Facebook that about 25 million doing the same thing. So that's their way of telling us that they want to be able to reach this audience from where they are, one way or the other from their phone or however. It's important for us to be able to connect with them in the way that is easy, and to get access to the information. So that is why we are looking at this format. And many of you understand the value of social media. The tricky part is getting it to work for you.
> There were a few questions that came in, and we have great feedback from all of you from the questionnaires. Some of those questions were about, how do I convince my boss that this is of value will service? despite evil service? In 2011, 28,000 people visited My Free Taxes dcom as the result of social media which was 50% more than the year before. In January of this year we had more than all of last year combined and three times as many as January from last year. We were also able to surpass well-known national brands like HFR block ,-com,-com ma Jackson Hewitt and we are not the national brand by any means. Also, our total social media impressions this year, so the first three weeks of the campaign, or about 1.1 million. So that means, all the times people were able to access or register the idea of myfreetaxes.com on social media cases.
> The good news is, to achieve that kind of success, if not because United Way or Wal-Mart or one economy are doing all the heavy lifting. What we are actually doing is using our network of organizations like you to help us. So, what I will show you is that this idea and this kind of success, anyone can achieve it, and it takes so little while to do but we will talk about the details of that.
> So that was the overview of what and why the campaign is about.
> I understand there are many different levels of social media expertise, so I will do my best to walk the middle ground which may be too much for some of you and not enough for others.
> So feel free to ask questions and certainly interrupt. I will do my best to have both. We will start out with the big three. Some of this might be review, but just hang in there. Twitter and Facebook, linked in, quick way to identify what is what is think of twitter as the source for news. Because people access it from their phones they can quickly get news around the world, whether it's brush fires in Texas or floods or the way that people are getting their news as fast as they possibly can.
> And that's okay. And chances are we know everyone pretty well, and part of that is because Facebook is driven by photos. It was started because of the photo book at people at school. And the photos make it very connected. There are human faces which is why probably most of you as an organization would probably find greater success there and many nonprofits do as well because it's easier to convey emotion on Facebook because of the images of the photos. And, business related information shared. You might notice to YouTube is missing and it is because for our purposes we will focus on these three. Today we are really focusing on more of eight text driven campaign. So just kind of go with me. I will also focus on links in way less -- LinkedIn weigh less and, do not think at any point that you cannot do this because I want you to feel empowered and as though you can buy the end of this.
> One of the reasons we are focusing on those three, LinkedIn, twitter and Facebook, or because they are our largest drivers of what is called search engine optimization. And what is that? Is the big long word. SCO means, when you type in something on Google, Google then goes out and scours the entire web. And it posted up on the list of 10 things on the first page there that it thinks you are asking for. And part of that is what you have asked for an part of it is because everyone on the web is doing search engine optimization or manipulating their texts. So it gets pulled up in that list near the top. You are trying to guess what keywords will be put in so they can come up in the search.
> So one of the things that is sort of interesting, and I will show you examples are they search. When I searched myself and my company -- I think my screen share just ended for some reason.
NAKIA: Do you have your web browser open?
KATE: It is open -- let me go back -- there we go. Sorry about that.
> So when I search for the media, here I am and I come up in all these locations. You can see that some of the biggest pullers are Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter. So their RVs like secret secret gremlins that work for them and just by having the page there, it pushes them up higher in the search. It means very amazing. That's one of the reasons and, if you do nothing else, just grabbed the names that go with Facebook. So if you want to have your organizations may bear, like Facebook. .com whatever.
> But the name of my company is made up. It was the title of the first police record. So of all the searches, I'm in the top seven, and the police are in the bottom too. So I'm using search engine optimization so I get to be found first. And I will show you how to do this as well.
> The other reason to do it is the brand recognition. When you are creating the Facebook page for yourself or any twitter page, you want to have the same name across each thing. So it's Facebook.com /Johnnette Hartnett. As much as you possibly can because all of that contributes to the search. Then, the funny thing is, twitter makes it easy for you to do that but Facebook and LinkedIn do not. I don't go why. They like to keep these things hit him. And, I will show you some places where this information is so that you can find it, but if you go to Facebook.com /user name and -- my screen share keeps on sharing.
> At the username is what's in the address bar and you can tell it whatever page you want. And it will let you take the availability to do that. And, with LinkedIn, you want to do the same thing. So now they allow you to have LinkedIn company pages here.
> And you can do things like, I haven't filled this out for me and you can figure that out here which is great. Anything you type on all of these sites pushes that search engine optimization piece even higher.
> And I need to keep moving, I'm sure there are questions that just hang on for our little bit longer.
> So how do you make it work. How do we make content that either gains more followers or creates the conversation and gets the word out.
> Was the biggest mistake nonprofits make with social media? And this would be it. They forget to be human. If the conversation, but two-way conversation. And the reason they connect with other people is on stories and people. So the icon doesn't really appear human, but iPhoto does. Photo of you hoping someone do their taxes or you add an event or that sort of thing. Which is why Facebook has more success with nonprofits because it's photo driven. And I think the idea is interesting. There is no value, it's not compelling for me in any way. So, let me give you an idea. Sort of eight personal way and then I will give you eight business way and being more social on social media spaces.