social networks

Nonprofit Social Network Survey Report

According to a survey conducted in March 2009 by NTEN, Common Knowledge, and ThePort, social networking has become an integral part of nonprofits’ online strategy. You may have already suspected that, but now you can get some hard numbers to justify that Facebook page you've been keeping so tidy and au currant. Then you can go all Matt Damon on your ED:

“You like apples? Of the 929 respondents to a survey, nearly three-quarters (74.2%) have a presence on Facebook, and 30.9% have one or more social networking communities on their own web site. How do you like them apples?”

But don’t take our word for it. Download the report and read it yourself. It’s free!

> Download the Social Network Survey Report

And if you're keeping track at home, that's two reports we've helped release during the NTC. Will there be another? Tune in tomorrow, same NTEN time, same NTEN channel.

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Twitter: Not Just Chatter But a Channel for Your Cause

Flickr Photo: AutomaniaIn the technology section of USA Today on Sunday, a lot of new folks learned about Twitter. The micro-blogging social network has grown from 200,000 users to over 2 million users in about a year, and individuals, companies, news outlets, fire departments, and nonprofit organizations have been using the free service to connect, inform, and engage.

If you joined us at the 2008 Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans, chances are you experienced the usefulness of the tool, too. NTC attendees connected with each other, made social plans, got notes from sessions they couldn't attend, knew when free ice cream was being handed out in the conference lobby and when the coffee was running out during breakfast plenaries.

As the article frames it, Twitter is one of those tools that seems to be trivial and a waste of time -- until you try it for yourself.

There so many social media and network tools out there, it doesn't makes sense for an individual -- never mind an organization -- to invest time and resources into trying them all out. But Twitter might be worth a some time.

Here are a few highlights, low-lights, and applications of Twitter to consider for your own purposes:

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Tonk'peh Spock

I sat down at my desk this morning only to discover at least a dozen invitations to "trust" my colleagues over at Spock.com. According to their site:

Spock is a search application that organizes information around people. The Spock vision is to create a search result of everyone in the world.

Of course, instead of working on my next workshop presentation, I immediately spent the next 45 minutes engaged in ar'kadan -- poking around and adding tags to my profile. I can't tell you how useful this tool may or may not end up being, but it certainly had a Vulcan death grip on my attention. (Cue laugh track.)

Have you tried Spock.com? What do you think?

NTEN member (and board member) Michelle Murrain shared an opinion on the Information Systems Forum last week:

Spock does seem interesting in that it uses "trust" rather than "friend" or "connection" as the metaphor for its social graph. This might actually make it more useful - I imagine people are much less likely to put people they don't really know in their "trust" network on Spock, whereas there is a real range of opinion about how well you need to know someone to get to be their "friend" on Facebook.

But what's "missing" (deliberately?) are messaging systems and groups. This means that it's not so useful for advocacy or fundraising as Facebook.

Oh - and hat tip to the Vulcan Language Dictionary. "Tonk'peh" translates to "Hello".

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Facebook Should Give You a T-Shirt

New York Times technology correspondent Saul Hansell recommends trying the following exercise:

Search for "lawyers" on Google. Take a look at the ads on the right side.
Now, search for "malpractice".
Finally, search for "lawyers" again. Notice the change in the ads.

As Mr. Hansell notes, this limited implementation of behavioral targeting isn't too bad:

"So far this is largely harmless. It’s hard to imagine any violation that comes from Google having access to what you did 30 seconds before. What’s interesting is what comes next. As Google moves to place advertising on sites like MySpace, which have no natural advertisers, there is ever more pressure for it to use other sources of information to raise the prices at which it can sell those ads."

This is precisely the morass Facebook waded into with their creepy Beacon advertising program. The NYT has a great blow-by-blow of the changes Facebook has made to Beacon over the past 5 weeks, highlighting its slow acceptance of the privacy issues inherent to behavioral targeting.

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