Today I’m thrilled to be at the annual conference for North Carolina nonprofits. This used to be a regular hangout for me, but in the last decade my work has shifted to more national organizations and I haven’t had the time or funding to attend it in many years. Nice to see all the new and old faces here.
The reason I’m here is that I was invited to be a co-presenter of NTEN’s We Are Media workshop. This all-day workshop is based on the fantastic curriculm developed by the NPtech community with Beth Kanter’s leadership a few years ago. For my breakout session on “Building Buzz” I’ve combined NTEN’s materials on the subject with my own network-centric approach. You can see the results in my presentation…
Building Buzz
View more presentations from Ruby Sinreich.
I promised the folks in my breakout session that I would post a comment with more ideas and resources from our discussion. Please add your own as well!
• Commenting policy, community moderation
Have your policy IN PLACE before you start moderating content. Here’s the policy I came up with for my local politics blog, with links at the end to some other good policies: http://www.orangepolitics.org/about/guidelines
We also talked about the HR implications of social media use, which is scary.
• Identity
Profiles are the foundation of social networks, and are the medium for the currency of reputation and trust that makes social media relevant and authentic. Good social networks allow users to manage their own profiles, decide who to connect to, and maybe even indicate who they trust. Make sure to use your organizational profile as an opportunity to tell people about you and your work.
• Lists
Lists on Twitter allow you to create/view a stream of tweets by a select group of people.
http://mashable.com/2009/11/02/twitter-lists-guide/
Examples:
http://twitter.com/lynneluvah/womenintech
http://twitter.com/SamRose/digitalmediaandlearning
http://twitter.com/SteveHeye/npo-tweeple
http://twitter.com/womensfunding/partner-orgs
http://twitter.com/Such_Tweet/such-tweet-sorrow
Lists on Facebook allow you to control permissions for, send messages to and to view status updates from specific groups of people.
http://mashable.com/2009/10/09/create-facebook-friend-lists/
• Hashtags/folksonomies, tag clouds, The Long Tail
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail
The presentation that recently blew my mind about tag clouds: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/slgrant/now-live-blogging-p3-workshop-anne-balsamo
My favorite tag, NPTECH:
http://twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech
http://www.delicious.com/popular/nptech
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/nptech
http://www.slideshare.net/tag/nptech
• Twitter clients
You will get a LOT more out of Twitter if you use a program (either via the web or on your desktop). Here are some suggestions, a full list of them is at: http://twitter.pbworks.com/Apps
Desktop
* Seesmic
* Tweetdeck
* Tweetie (Mac)
* Spaz (Win)
Web
* Hootsuite
* Seesmic
* Brizzly
Mobile
* Twitter for iPhone
* Twitter for Android
* Tweetdeck
* Twidroid
* Seesmic
* Hootsuite
* Tweed
* Spaz
* Twitterberry
* m.twitter.com