Flickr photo by red5standingbyLet's kick off February with some advice for getting your organization (or yourself) advocating for your cause with free social media tools.

First, there's Twitter. This tool should be familiar to the NTEN community by now, but just in case you're tuning in for the first time, Twitter is a free social networking/micro-blogging tool that allows you to submit short updates to your network via the web, your mobile device, or a third-party application; you also receive short updates from the network you're "following."

How to apply it to your mission:

• Update your volunteers, constituents, and friends with the latest news about your cause (a bill, a candidate, a campaign, an event, etc.).
• Organize attendees or participants at an event or project in real-time.
• Engage a community on a personal level -- Beth Kanter leveraged her network on Twitter to help her win the Giving Challenge.

You may want to read this article on Read/Write Web about Twitter's emergence as a viable communications platform. Note the helpful information and considerations for how to use it!

Next, there's KickApps, something I just read about last week. This free tool allows any small organization or individual to launch and manage their own social networking site.

I played around with the tool for just a few minutes and found:

• It takes just minutes to sign up, set your display theme, and configure your basic settings.
• The free version comes with ads.
• It's full service social networking: video, photos, blogs, forums, member profiles.
• You can even create your own widgets on the site to be used within the platform, or anywhere else.

The question will be whether hosting your own social networking site is better than taking advantage of the established sites out there (Like Facebook and LinkedIn), especially if your goal is to reach out to a community rather than provide resources for a community you have to build.

Finally, I want to share this post with you -- a case study about how an individual, Tina Su, who had little experience with blogging, created a blog and built her readership to 2000 subscribers in just 3 months. Now, the context cited may be oriented toward for-profits, but the step-by-step information is applicable for your advocacy and engagement efforts.

Key takeaways, with nonprofit applications:

• Start with concrete goals. This should be your Web 2.0 mantra. Don't jump into blogging, twittering, or social networking for your work just because it's cool. If you want results that impact your mission, you have to start with a goal and a plan. What do you want your communication to do? Start there, then set actual metrics: number of readers? number of actions? donations raised? Then, don't forget to track your results against your goals so you can make adjustments as needed and determine your ROI.
• Generate the right content. This would seem obvious, but it's the kind of content and how you generate it that's important to consider. In this medium, the keys to good content are to be sincere, frequent, short and to-the-point, and conversational. Keep people inspired, and keep them coming back. In the case of advocacy, can you get volunteers and constituents to share their stories and updates? And don't forget the power of images and video.
• Drive traffic to your message. You can do this in traditional ways like promoting your blog (or twitter profile, Facebook group, etc.) in your email signature, on your main web site, on your business card, etc. But you can also use the viral nature of Web 2.0 to expand your readership exponentially. Become a participant in the conversations elsewhere (Digg, del.icio.us, other blogs), and you'll find people returning the favor.

Try out some of these tools and tips today, and then come back and tell me how it's going!