Jonathon D. Colman, The Nature Conservancy

So tell me if this scenario sounds familiar: Your ED wanders into your office asking that you build an online marketing campaign to publicize a large-scale announcement. When's this big announcement taking place? Tomorrow. What's the marketing budget? Nada.

But don't worry: thanks to online social news networks, you've got the perfect hammer in your tool belt for this crisis.

The rise of "web 2.0" has forever changed the game of online marketing. Sure, with enough time and money on your side, you could always draw customers to your site with impersonal ads, affiliate promotions, and expensive broadcast media. But if you're like me (and I am) then you're not made of money and your budget doesn't have room for surprises. And sometimes you're charged with building buzz right now for your organization.

With social media, you can take direct, personal action to find new niches and leads within the most popular, dynamic sites on the web. The services are all free, getting set up is easy, and -- as you'll see below -- your results are completely measurable. Oh, and the people will come -- so many, in fact, that you might just crash your web site with all of the attention that you receive. So while your IT staff may not be so happy with you, your ED will be quite pleased.

Social news networks include a rapidly growing family of presences like Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, Newsvine and similar services like the social bookmarking tools StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us. In many ways, these are among the most popular, active web sites on the Internet and are all built for usability, speed, and search engine-friendliness. These sites differ from the "traditional" mega-social networks like MySpace and Facebook primarily because their singular focus is on aggregating and ranking news stories and other content submitted by users rather than helping users connect with one another.

These sites use a mix of ranking algorithms and user votes to parse the good user-submitted content from the bad. There is almost never a human editor checking over submissions for accuracy, impartiality, nor other common journalistic standards. While this strategy definitely leads to a lot of low-interest content (read: "noise"), it also allows under-reported niche news and other small, personal stories to shine. Once a news story gains enough individual, unique user votes to become "popular", it is often promoted on the homepage of the news network and can therefore attain a high level of visibility and clickthrough to the organization's landing page for the news story.

Exactly how much clickthrough are we talking about? Let’s look at some engaging content that my organization recently published on our site and then submitted to Digg...

The Nature Conservancy and its partners recently announced the purchase and preservation of over 161,000 acres of working forest in the Adirondacks of New York. As part of our efforts to promote this announcement, I posted a link on Digg.com to our content for this story, a process that took about five minutes. Within twelve hours, the post became "popular" and was promoted to the Digg.com homepage for everyone to see. Once there, it generated the following activity on my organization's nature.org web site:

• 7,600+ unique visitors to nature.org in a single hour (a level high enough to significantly impact the performance of our web site)

• More than 35,000 unique visitors to nature.org in one day (making it, at the time, our best day ever)

• Over 21,000 views of our landing page for this story in just one day

... and that's just from Digg. We also received thousands more visitors and page views from StumbleUpon and other social media outlets where we promoted this story. Plus, due to the high visibility of these news sites, over thirty bloggers (as measured by Technorati, a popular blog search engine) and online news outlets also wrote about and linked to our story -- without us making a single pitch. Finally, all of these new inbound links from high-ranking web sites and blogs drove the Conservancy's landing page for this story to turn up in search engines about three times faster than usual and to rank higher for our targeted keywords.

But big numbers don't tell the whole story. Social news networks also allow their user base to comment on the news they experience and vote for. Following is a sample of the overwhelmingly positive commentary that our story yielded:

• “TNC will launch a major private fundraising campaign for this landmark purchase. Remember that, if you can help, do!”

• “This is such great news! I've given to the Nature Conservancy for years, so feel like I've helped in some small way…and it sure will make me feel confidant [sic] about giving more.”

• “Well I know where my next $110 tax-deductable [sic] contribution is going.”

You just can't buy that kind of commentary from your supporters, let alone people who might not have ever heard of you before. In fact, beyond staff time, we didn't spend a dime on any of this web marketing activity.

And, believe it or not, this particular success was relatively minor in scale; just a few months ago, we brought over 76,000+ visitors to our web site in a single day with a similar Digg campaign.

So how can you begin engaging with social news networks? Here are a few best practices:

1. Join now. It can take months, if not longer, to build a credible, authoritative profile on the major social news networks. All you really need is just 5-10 minutes of submitting and voting on stories each day, about the amount of time you'd be waiting for your coffeemaker to beep in the morning.

2. Be friendly. Connecting to popular, highly visible users can get your news posts seen and voted upon faster and by more people than they would otherwise. Most friendships on social news networks are supported by a quid pro quo mentality: friends will vote for your stories if you vote for theirs. Build a steady base of strong supporters interested in your topical area and don't be afraid to drop any connections who aren’t voting for your stories.

3. Don't spam. Be a good community member by posting interesting stories and breaking news from the entire web. Under no circumstances should you just post content from your own site; spamming is easy to detect, universally loathed and can lead to getting you banned.

4. Flip the funnel. Offer your site visitors the opportunity to promote your content for you by integrating buttons that allow them to promote your story on Digg and other sites. This often lends credibility to your content and organization as a whole. It also gives your constituents or customers the opportunity to feel like they're making a difference.

5. Cross-pollinate: Did you know that you can use Twitter (and its new hot cousin, Plurk) or even good ol' IM to promote your stories on Digg? Or that you can post your social news stories to your Facebook profile and ask your contacts to vote for them? Just be sure that you return the favor when asked.

6. Honesty is the best policy. I use my real name on social news networks and am very open about the fact that I'm a marketer for The Nature Conservancy. This way, I can respond to user questions and comments as myself yet also leverage the knowledge of my colleagues around the world to answer technical or complex questions. Operating by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's "Code of Ethics" will keep you in the clear.

To bring new visitors to your organization's web site and get your supporters talking about your key news announcements, social news networks can deliver a high ROI. Using these social media venues, The Nature Conservancy has continually succeeded in growing our web traffic, increasing our search engine positioning, heightening our visibility throughout the blogosphere, and inspiring our supporters... all in less than 24 hours.