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.

Beth Kanter, Social Media Guru

Over the past year, as more and more nonprofits have figured out how to integrate social networking and social media tools into their communications strategies, the question has remained: Do these tools and strategies really help nonprofits reach outcomes? While many of the tools are free, we still need to ask, "What's the value (ROI) of investing our time?"

Let me begin with some basic definitions from Social Media gurus:

[Ed. Note: As you probably know, the Case Foundation, together with Facebook Causes and Parade magazine, is going to award $750,000 to charity. The NTEN Blog has been running profiles on some of the participants.]

To celebrate her 51st birthday on January 11th, Beth Kanter is "...trying to get 51 people to donate $10 in 51 hours to the Sharing Foundation's America's Giving Challenge over at Global Giving."

Now, while we here at NTEN in no way believe that Beth is actually 51, we certainly support her efforts on behalf of the Sharing Foundation's Roteang Orphanage. NTEN community, you know what to do:

• Read Beth's birthday blog post
• Contribute to her cause
• Wish Beth a Happy Birthday on Friday

Thanks for all your efforts on behalf of the NPTech community and the world in general, Beth.  You rock.

Happy Birthday from Brett, Holly, Annaliese, Karl, and Anna.

Beth Kanter not only attended the Cambodian Bloggers Summit at the beginning of September, she used ChipIn to raise the funds she needed, a great example of advocacy put into practice. While in Cambodia, Beth taught workshops on video blogging and web 2.0, ate a dish of fried ants, grasshoppers, and frogs' legs, and -- here comes the tie-in to the title of this post -- distributed t-shirts to bloggers and orphans. Nice work, Beth!

You can read more about her trip on her blog and in a new article she's published in Read/WriteWeb's ongoing series on nonprofits and technology, mentioned previously in these very pages.

The amazing Beth Kanter has won the inaugural NTEN Prize for being a fantastic and amazing member of the nonprofit technology community. We are awarding this prize to the community member who has made extraordinary contributions to nonprofit technology - with generosity, with spirit, with wisdom and with passion.

Nedra puts it this way: "Congrats to Beth Kanter who received the Fantasticness Award at the Nonprofit Technology Conference. She's the hardest working gal in blog and roll, and I think she's fantastic not just for the sheer volume of content-packed blog posts she puts out, but also for her willingness to help us learn along with her as she explores the cutting edge of social media. You deserve it, Beth!"

We could not agree more and award the NTEN Prize for NPTech Fantasticness to Beth Kanter. Since she was not in the room when the prize was announced (as the Oscars, it is a secret until the last minute), her lifetime flickr and Typead accounts as a token of appreciation, and the NTEN Prize, an ebony wand for the 'magic touch' and amazingness in the NTEN community, will be given to her in a separate ceremony.

The NTEN Prize: An Ebony Wand