In both Twitter and Facebook, the number of followers you have is the first thing that impresses on a report, but the interactions between your account and your fans is what really shows a healthy social media presence.

For average weekly reports, the needs are different from special campaigns (more on that at the bottom). To present the health of an account in a readable summary, you need to get beyond metrics. I like to include actual examples of Hot Tweets/Posts, because the people reading the report are not usually reading every update. I also like to do a brief overview of any changes to the account’s personality–think grade school report–looking at the mood of the information put out by us and sent by fans. Did we talk mostly about ourselves this week? Were fans distracted by a major world event?

Then we can dive into the numbers.

Generally I go next to in depth coverage of any campaign (such as converting newsletter subscribers to followers), and finish with the number of following/followers (or fans). Because social media sites frequently undergo changes, I include a general update on the site itself, such as when Twitter does massive spam account deletions or when Facebook changes its layout and confuses users. Finally, I include a visual, such a a graph of tweet popularity, easily pulled from an application like BudUrl or Twitalizer.

Beware, especially with new users, of a tendency to tweet and share highly interesting finds, without linking back to your own site or product often. It’s the nature of social media to get excited about all the new information, so your reports may need to include the number of references to your company product or website. This is particularly true when there are multiple account administrators.

Here’s an example, culled from various updates I’ve written:

Overview

• Events and articles are not being consistently tweeted in x, y, z cities
• Updates do not always include the product name, since tweets now show up in Google search results, mentioning our own product and url helps boost our search rankings.
• We are increasingly included in Follow Friday (#FF) mentions, in addition to sending thank you messages we could consider a future campaign to reward this action.

Hot Tweets
A tweet offering a free coupon for Veloce bikes in exchange for the first review on their merchant profile was our most popular on 7/23, generating x clicks (y unique clicks). It was retweeted by @BikePortland (# of followers). A review was written by a new user within an hour.

Newsletter subscribers conversion campaign:
This month I imported all of our newsletter subscribers emails from Exact Target to Twitter and used the automatically generated list of matching Twitter users to follow people, in this case weeding out those who had a location outside of the relevant city. (Alternately, we could have sent a mass message inviting people to follow us.) Of course, this method only finds emails, names, so if a business or fan set up a Twitter account with another email, this would not find them.

Twitter system updates: Twitter conducted a massive elimination of spam accounts earlier this month, so some of our accounts show a drop in followers. We have continued to gain a few per day in each market.

Followers/Following this month:

Followers/Following last month:

Graph of tweet popularity

Special campaigns

Smart companies create exclusive (or seemingly exclusive) offers for their fans and followers, igniting a buzz of interest that changes dramatically by the minute as the information make the viral move from user to user. For example, ToysRUs put their Black Friday preview on their Facebook page–and only on their Facebook page. The result was a tidal wave of new fans. To repeat this success, you would need not only a great exclusive offer, but the knowledge of how people found out about the deal.

For this sort of hot campaign, you need daily reports of not only fan counts, but more importantly who is sharing the information and how. Facebook sharing, Twitter keyword monitoring, and RSS feeds on keywords would be necessary to track how people spread the word of this opportunity.

It’s important to monitor this sort of campaign hourly and report daily because it can hit new channels, such as large sites or Digg, and explode, but you need to know how it got there,  where to push it next, and how to maintain the thread of connection to new users by reeling them in with new information or deals.

Why social media is important and useful

• You are a hub of green info for locals, Twitter helps you reach them
• Why numbers are not important, involvement is

Who’s on twitter?

• A few examples per city

Terminology and functions

• Using @
• @ to your account to see who is talking about you
• Direct messages
• # (in general and per market ones to note)
• RT
• Topic trending
• Local trending
• Geotagging
• Favorites
• Each tweet is a url, forever, and searchable
• Search engine optimization-using keywords to increase tweet relevance to Google

Search.twitter.com-advanced searches

• to find mentions of brand name
• to find other merchants by name
• to search by radius
• to find people talking about similar products and identify #s

Contacts

• How to import your address book to Twitter
• 15% of merchants are on Twitter, 35% of users are

More ways of finding people to follow

• Using the basic “Find People” to search for names
• Using Twitter Lists
• Seeing who other users follow and talk to
• Search # keywords for your city or topic

Gaining followers

• Responding to new followers with a thank you, link to facebook, link to site, or best of all, a special offer
• Creating ongoing, exclusive incentives to keep users active and to attract friends of friends
• What to do about spam accounts and baiting

Creating quick content

• How to Twitterize all the information you receive (being a hub)
• Post sales with exclusive offers for each network (Twitter users use code TW, Facebook use code FB, etc)
• Promote events of interest to your readers
• Be the first to post exclusive or breaking information relevant to your followers
• The importance of looking like a human–writing occasional personal tweets
• Why and how to shrink links and track them as they travel the twittersphere

Brief overview of TweetDeck, Twitalizer, and others

Q&A

This piece is one I started last year, but this year it includes all the recycling hotlines and energy resources, but it also has cool cultural resources like Urban Edibles (a way cool map of free food growing wild in the city) and a list of websites to check out including Inhabitat and Grist.org. Doing this for each city (Seattle, Twin Cities, Denver/Boulder, Silicon Valley/Santa Cruz, Berkeley/Oakland, and of course Portland) was a fascinating look at how these cities function–and don’t. Some don’t even have a clear hazardous waste disposal site for residents, or they do but no one ever picks up the phone. Portland is far and away the best at this online, but Berkeley has the EcoHaus resource center with a green hotline that you can call and ask anything about eco living. Anything!

I want one!

Related on Slate, How decent bike parking could revolutionize American cities.

Wondering about that peak in 2007? 2007 is when Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth won an Academy Award (it came out in 2006), it’s also the year he split the Nobel with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and he was runner up for Time’s Person of the Year.

Take a look at 2004! I started writing about sustainable lifestyle choices at the end of 2006, but looking at this I wish I had started earlier.

Right now you may be thinking that ’sustainable’ has been used for a long time in other contexts, while ‘eco friendly’ and ‘green living’ are tied to the trend. Here are the previous terms with sustainability:

As expected. In this graph sustainability is likely getting a boost from the agricultural and business worlds, where corporations prefer the term. PepsiCo and Walmart issue Sustainability Reports, not Green Living Reports.

The video is embedded below, some browsers have trouble with it.

At EcoMetro, I created and now manage the following Twitter accounts:

• National: @EcoMetro
• Portland: @PDXEcoMetro
• Seattle: @EcoMetroSEA
• Twin Cities: @EcoMetroTwinC
• East Bay: @EcoMetroEastBay

and soon Denver and Silicon Valley, too.

I also created Facebook accounts for each, but handed that over to the marketing team because I don’t really like Facebook and they do.

My work at EcoMetro is divided into two categories: Writing short articles and editing bloggers on the website, and writing and creating interactive content for the print books (circ. 100,000 in 09)’. EcoMetro is part of Celilo Group Media, a green lifestyle media company.

• Print Guides in 6 cities

• Creation and editing of the ecometro website

• Interactive print content (my favorite!)

For a description of the process and how I work:

• The story of the revamping the print guides in their 7th year

and

• Creating the website from scratch–coming soon. We started from wireframes, up from there.

Quotes of this were picked up and repeated in Treehugger, various blogs, and the book The Gort Cloud (excerpt).

EcoMetro.com,What Nau? May 2008

On Friday, May 2, Nau announced that “due to crisis in the capital markets” the company was unable to obtain enough funds to move forward. They did it with their typical charm, even nabbing the best headline, “Goodbye for Nau” for their press release. Through their 5% donation program, Nau donated $223,000 to non-profits in just under one year of business. That’s an admirable achievement for a little company struggling to stay afloat.

I covered Nau twice before they launched, first for Ultra PDX in November 06′ and later for Plenty Magazine, so this is the death of one of my pet companies. The offices were buzzing with energy back then, and the people could not have been nicer or more enthusiastic. They were heavy hitters too, coming from years of experience at places like Patagonia and Nike. So, what went wrong? At the risk of kicking Nau while it’s down, I saw this coming.

Nau set out to be the Prada of the outdoor industry, and at first it seemed they would pull it off. With a target market of creative, outdoorsy types and a growing national interest in environmental lifestyles, Nau launched at just the right moment in early 07′. What they put out, however, was…frumpy. I say that shamefully, because when VP of Product Design Mark Galbraith walked me through the sample racks in late 06′, I was drooling.

The bike-friendly skirts had me at hello, but also the presence of new textiles, several of which they engineered to be recyclable or compostable because the existing fabrics didn’t cut the mustard. Their work spelled new standards for an industry which has a significant environmental impact.

According to the Organic Trade Association, conventional cotton uses 25% of the world’s insecticides, and if you haven’t checked the labels on your raincoats yet, look up some of the chemicals and treatments involved in making them. The clothes we wear to tromp around outside have a significant footprint of their own, and Galbraith and I talked about this at length, but that sentiment was never spelled out in their marketing campaigns. It seemed Nau would set a higher bar, and maybe they have, but unfortunately not for style.

Galbraith had explained how he wanted to follow high fashion for its timelessness. The outdoor industry, especially snowboard clothing, is trendy and seasonal, requiring frequent replacement. Away from the drawing board went neon colors, away went blue camo prints, and good riddance. But Nau came out with a line almost exclusively in forest green, mud brown and a dirty cream. And then they charged 3 times the average for it, consistently marking everything down by 40% after a few months on a beautiful-but-absurdly-large Flash website.

There was nothing visually special about the clothes at first glance, and they seemed not at all like the ones I had viewed when I visited the offices. Was it just the energy of the place that made everything look beautiful and new, or did they wimp out at the last minute and go with safer, basic designs? Creative, outdoorsy people want to look like creative, outdoorsy people. The fashionistas, the hipsters, the creative set with the funky glasses, wear edgy, unique clothing. The photos were always of pretty people in the outdoor world, but the prices belonged in urban boutiques. Their Portland store was even in the massive suburban Bridgeport Place mall, alongside stores like Pottery Barn and Anthropologie.

As outdoorsy as any of us may be, we walk mostly on urban streets. And what’s the fun in a $250 sweater if no one is going to ask you about it, giving you the chance to talk about the organic fibers or recyclable clasps?

I’m sad to see this little company leave the block. Besides their non-profit donations, I hope the Nau legacy will be that consumers ask questions about the fabrics we wear including the production process and how it can be recycled in the end, as well as the heart of the company behind it all.

Most everything is 50% off online, so get your goods nau or never.

EcoMetro, December 2008 (condensed version appeared in 2008 East Bay EcoMetro Guides)

Name: Tierra Del Forte
Job Title: Fashion Designer
Time at job: Since 1999
Neighborhood you live in: N Temescal in N. Oakland

Del Forte is partnered with the Davis, CA based Sustainable Cotton Project, and uses only 100% organic cotton for her denim.

How do you commute? One top goal is to bike to work. My car is 30 years old, so I’ve definitely gotten a lot of use out of it.

Who inspired your view of environmentalism? A friend of mine—who now works with me– has been involved in eco-fashion for 12 years, mostly hemp, way before it was a big to-do.  She was super knowledgeable and super committed, but it never really clicked with me until I was doing the research to start my own company. Conventional cotton is SO polluting, and organic farming is SO beneficial.

What’s one positive thing that encouraged your environmentalism early on? There was a really positive reaction in the industry and buyers and boutiques I respect were really excited. I could combine my aesthetic with something I believed in. People who weren’t actively looking for eco-fashion were really pleased when they were presented with it. A lot of what we are doing with this company is consumer education—eco-fashion doesn’t have to be scratchy burlap jumpers! We just show them our product; the other part is a little trickier.

What inspires you to keep working for change? I’ve invested a lot in this company financially, emotionally, and time-wise. I really really believe in this sector of the market—not just my company in particular. Press regarding eco-fashion in the last couple of years has been growing and growing, and it’s becoming more and more of a focus.

What have you witnessed changing about the sustainable community in the last 5 years? I’m fairly new to it, but it’s getting a lot more glamorous. The environment is a huge issue in Hollywood right now, and there’s probably upsides and downsides to that, but the events are being better produced, the glamour portion is rising, the only fear is that the issue will get lost. Are people going to get too distracted and star struck? But mostly I think it’s really good.

What do you envision the world will be like in 5 years? In 10? What I’m really striving for is that sustainable practices aren’t just limited to a few companies. I’d like to see all companies start looking at how they are making their goods. Consumer demand is going to keep growing, so I hope sustainable practices are going to become a quality that successful companies have.

Where do you get your information on the environment? Tons! I work with people at the Organic Exchange, and the Sustainable Cotton Project especially because they deal with family farmers in CA. Cradle to Cradle, Paul Hopkins, Worldchanging, Treehugger, Grist, G Living…all of these I find are really really great. Then there’s social networking sites like Earth.

How do you, in your own circles of family and friends, impart your sustainable practices? I grew up in Berkley, so we grew up with things like recycling, and things that the rest of the country is starting to do in a big way we’ve done for 30 years. Being in this industry has made my family and friends more aware. Small changes that are easy for people to make, they tend to do.

What are three things you do to be green? In the office we buy only eco-friendly office supplies when they’re available—all marketing is recycled post consumer paper with soy-based ink, all paper in the office is recycled post consumer, we print on both sides; we avoid shipping garments any farther than we need to, and most everything is done here in the U.S. which drastically reduces our use of fossil fuels. Where there’s an option I buy the eco friendly option—and I buy a lot less than I used to. Beauty, food, fashion…I’ve discovered I need a lot less things than I thought.

What do you think is the #1 thing people can do to be green? Be an informed consumer, read labels. The mainstream marketing world has realized how much of a selling point sustainability is and they care co-opting the language left and right, using words like organic and natural. Demand the products you want—if your grocery store doesn’t carry organic, then ask for it. If your favorite boutique has no eco friendly fashion available, ask for it.

Online shoppers can purchase Del Forte Denim from the store list.