Twitter announced on August 13th that they will be integrating an analytics tool into the popular micro-blogging site. Organizations doing outreach on Twitter now have much more information about how those efforts are paying off.

I've been asked to come up with ROI metrics for a grant proposal that includes a major long-haul, long-view social-web initiative, involving:

• Enterprise-wide blogging program for staff policy experts
• Enterprise-wide initiative to train staff in use of social-networking tools of various kinds -- to bring staff online in a robust way, so that we are able to carry on many more simultaneous, varied conversations, build tighter relationships with constituents, and participate broadly in the live web.
• effort to establish beachheads in external social-web communities -- in Flickr, MySpace, Upcoming.org, Digg.com, YouTube, LinkedIn, and so on. Focus would be not so much on putting institutional or campaign-related profiles in these contexts, as getting staff -- actual human beings, instead of a billboard -- participating in these communities.
• Major effort to enlist constituents as primary messengers -- give them widgets, blogs, content-distribution tools, and so on, let them know their efforts to spread the word and lend us whatever they have to give -- time, creativity, whatever -- is critical to advancing my organization's mission.

What we really want to do is create passionate users -- nurture and develop "constituent evangelists."

Yay!  Aaron Pettigrew and I have figured out a work-around to get these blogs indexed, and thus findable, by the major blog search engines.  Last week I checked and was dismayed to discover that posts here were not appearing in Technorati, Google Blogsearch, Yahoo Blogsearch or several other key blog search engines.  For some reason the blogging software we are using wasn't "pinging" the search engines to let them know when we had new content posted.    No one knew why this wasn't happening.  It was a problem.