Flickr Photo: Luc LegayYou use social networks at work, right? It's okay to admit it. In fact, we want you to tell us all about it in a survey about social network use by nonprofits that we're running with Common Knowledge and ThePort.

> Take the Survey!

It should only take you about 5 minutes to complete the survey and contribute to the nonprofit tech community knowledgebase. (It took me about 8, but I kept checking how many people were watching my fundraising video in between questions.)

We'll release the results at the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco. We'll maintain your confidentiality, and your responses are anonymous.

The Nonprofit Social Network Survey is a joint project of NTEN, Common Knowledge and ThePort

> Take the Survey!

If you have any questions or comments about the survey, please email Rachel Weidinger.

Flickr Photo: alexander drachmannWe started the week off here at NTEN with a Q&A session with Chris Brogan, who answered questions from NTEN members about engaging people through social media. In case you missed it, you can see a transcript of the questions in the materials section (and if you're a member of NTEN, you can get the recording) here.

Chris commented a few times on how impressed he was by the questions you all asked him -- demonstrating yet again that, in many ways, the nonprofit sector is a leader in harnessing the power of social media to engage and energize communities and individuals online.

Here is a summary of take-aways from the session:

I got a heads-up about a free event promotion and calendaring service that allows you to create widgets and pages for free.

It took me just a few minutes to sign up, create an event, and customize the widget by adjusting colors (see it below). I also got a web page for added information about the event, RSVPs, and collecting information from those interested. It even allows people to subscribe to event updates.

SpongeCell, the software provider, provides tracking data (widget and page views) and lets you collect your subscribers' contact information. Not bad for a free suite of tools! (The software service also provides email and SMS messaging to your contacts, but fees apply per number of messages sent.)

What's cool is the ease of integration and sharing of the widgets -- think Facebook. I'm not really a techie (I just play one on TV), but I found the back-end management and creative tools very straightforward.

1. The "Wi-Fi Detector Shirt". They claim it displays wireless signal strength with glowing, animated bars, right there on the shirt. If this actually works, it's the Coolest Thing Ever we've seen this week.
2. Sprout. Maybe you saw our Love Your Techie widget? Sprout has the potential to change the game.
3. Heather Goes Bonkers when her organization wins $1000 from America's Giving Challenge. You've got to love the enthusiasm: if they had hit for $50k, this may have been inappropriate for the office.
4. Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC? Does that make McCain a Xerox Alto
5. Visualizing Information: An Introduction to Information Design. It's well designed!
6. Miriam Engelberg lost her battle with cancer, but her comics live on.
7. Seesmic. YouTube meets Twitter, eh? The company's founder describes himself as a "serial entrepreneur".
8. DeviantArt. Never mind the name -- there are only a few furries. Social networking built around art is an interesting idea, if not original: Photo.net has allowed member interaction for years.
9. Wired Magazine's infographic "The Life Cycle of a Blog Post", as featured in our blog.
10. 5min's video tutorials, including "How to Rock", and the indispensable "How to Ignore Facebook App Invites".

Back when everyone was saying Al Gore "invented the Internet," no one rolled their eyes more than the Brits. Back then, the very notion of Internet-based technologies was enough to send British eyes into one-eighties, never mind the marriage of politics and social media. The idea of the Queen appearing on YouTube? Patently ridiculous.

What a change a few years can bring, because there she is, on YouTube's Royal Channel, with her annual Christmas speech and video clips of Prince William flying a plane.

With the next general election looming in 2009, politicians are beginning to mirror their American counterparts in hopes of winning more votes.

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.

Recently, NTEN Member Paul Lamb presented to the NTEN Discuss Affinity Group his LinkedIn fundraising experiment: using the social network as a tool to create dollars for Street Tech students through the LinkedIn Answers feature.

A few Affinity Group members felt this was on the borderline of the LinkedIn user agreement and social network etiquette.

NTEN Affinity Groups member Ari Davidow recently prompted a discussion by asking:

Have people had success fundraising by setting up causes in Facebook? For what organizations do they work best? Is there a way to market joining the cause other than virally?

Responses ranged from the pragmatic:

to the dubious:

Since it is so uncontrolled I wonder about the reputation that Causes will develop and if it will be a good thing to be listed there.  Also, it is fine to try it as a learning experience if you are interested but I wouldn't suggest putting in an effort as though this was going to be effective.

Only 10 years ago, social networks were built quite differently. We might pump a few hands at conferences, place a few phone calls or meet people for lunch. A labor-intensive way of expanding the little black book, to be sure, but that's the way everybody did it. Networks lived in brainspace and on slips of paper.

But a decade is a long time. Person-to-person meetings are still a great way to make connections, but networks have increasingly less to do with seeing people and more to do with outlets such as LinkedIn.

I'm a total snob when it comes to MySpace. My house is pretty much always spotless, and that's the way I like my interface design, too: clean.

So I get the chills when I check out MySpace. Too cluttered! Nonetheless, it's a tool nonprofits cannot ignore. Folks like IFAW and many others have used MySpace to engage and activate a whole new constituency.

If you're looking to start a MySpace campaign, or if you have one already and want to improve it, check out Heather Mansfield's post on optimizing your MySpace page.