You know that we're always trying something new here at NTEN, especially if it means that it will bring our members closer together. We recently launched a couple of roundtable discussions - phone calls with an online chat component - for IT Staff and communications/marketing folks. Today we met up with the marketing folks and had a great discussion about social media policies, facebook, communicating within your organization, and lots more.

Transcript of the chat portion is below. Feel free to join us in September for our next Communications Roundtable or IT Staff Roundtable!

Today is world AIDS day.

Although the fight against AIDS has come a long way, there's still a lot of work to do. Scientists have created amazing drugs to combat the affects of the disease. Still, the only cure is not to get infected in the first place. That means talking about it, sharing information, making sure that AIDS stays part of our national and international conversation.

The folks at AIDS.gov understand that. Smartly, they've created a whole campaign aimed at people who LOVE to talk: bloggers. At Blogger's Unite, you will find everything you need to write about AIDS and spread the cure, one post at a time.

Flickr Photo: kirstenvIf there are any "Laws of Blogging," then posting consistently is one of them. One of the keys to retaining and even increasing your readership is to post regularly. My own personal experience with the NTEN blog is that more IS better. The more we post, the more traffic we have, period. I'm sure there's going to be some point when this will no longer hold true, but for now, that's our reality.

Which means, of course, that I am now trapped. I've worked really hard over the last few months to become a (near) daily blogger. In fact, you're reading this while I'm on vacation because I made sure to have a few posts in the bank before I left. But being a daily blogger is a commitment rivaled only by kids and marriage. (OK, that's an exaggeration, but it is a lot of work.)

So I thought I would share some of my challenges, as well as a few of the things that help me out along the way. Mostly, though, I want you to write this post. Share with us. What are the strategies that you use to make your blogging work? What are the difficulties you encounter?

Here are my challenges:

For some reason, I've been shadowing Beth Kanter on the conference circuit lately. I've had the great pleasure of listening to her speak several times in the last few months -- with more to come! At some point during every presentation, one of the attendees, whose mind has just been blown by her awesomeness, asks "Do you have that written down somewhere?"

Beth's answer is always the same. "Just 'Google' Beth. My blog will be in the top of the listings. See?! Another reason to blog. It increases your search engine rankings!"

While I've always agreed with her -- blogging has clearly increased our own search rankings -- I now confess that I never truly understood why... until today!

Many thanks to Paul Hyland for posting this Wired Magazine infographic about the secret life of your blog post on his Facebook news feed. It sums it all up nicely. Next time I see Beth, I'll be able to agree with her whole heartedly.

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!

One of the big concerns organizations have when considering branching out with new social media tools is that the channels flow in more than one direction.

Blogs are a habit for most of us in this nptech community -- reading them, writing them, and commenting on them -- but for organizations just starting out, comments on blogs can cause enough fear to throw up road blocks.

But, as NTEN member Britt Bravo puts it, "Has anyone ever died from a blog comment?"

While we don't normally promote job opportunities in the NTEN blog, this one seems like it might be tailor-made for one of our community members.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is looking for an Online Community Manager:

Play a key role in creating a vibrant online discussion community for Knight Foundation and shape it into the premier digital presence focused on journalism excellence, communities and systemic, transformational change. Help establish the foundation as the leading provocateur for community transformation in the digital age. This position serves as Knight’s eyes, ears and - in cooperation with other Knight staff - voice in the blogosphere.

Read the full listing on the NTEN Jobs Board.  Let us know if you get it!

As part of our association with the Neighborhood Networks Conference, NTEN asked for a list of resources on social networks, blogging, and tagging, as they relate to nonprofits.  This amazing community came through, and the aggregated resources can now be found in a single Google Document we’ve shared with the world.

But this is only the beginning.  I’m sure we haven’t begun to tap the accumulated knowledge of the NTEN community, so if you have a related resource you think we should add, please post it in a comment, below.

"The old forms are in ruins. The benumbed world is shaken up, the old human spirit is invalidated and in flux towards a new form."

Over the weekend, I went to the Corcoran Museum in DC and found this quote by the founder of the Bauhaus Movement in architecture, Walter Gropius. I think it beautifully captures the spirit of this year's NTC. The nonprofit technology community is in flux towards a new form: becoming more accessible and inviting; having constructive and higher level conversations; celebrating our work; expanding the networks; flushing out the buzz from the bullet-proof; pushing and challenging technology assumptions and our business processes; and having a lot of fun while were at it. I was told by a Silicon Valley old skooler who attended for the first time that the NTC wasn't just a good nonprofit conference, but a great technology conference...period.

I scan the nptech listings on Technorati once a day or so. Today I ran across this post, which led me to this post. I am really getting annoyed.

I'm a big believer in blogs. They are a great outlet for sharing, tips, tricks, ideas, experiences, knowledge, and INFORMED opinions. Lately though, I feel like there's a lot of UNINFORMED opinion sharing going on. There are more and more bloggers embracing the role of "watchdog" who are misprepresenting organizations (like my own!) who are just trying to do good. It's not right.