I get calls and emails almost every day from folks who want to know: "How do I start a Facebook group?" My response, invariably, is: "WHY do you want a Facebook group?"

That's the topic we're covering this week in We Are Media: Social Networks (and Widgets) for Community Building, Taking Action, and/or Fundraising. Why are social networks important to our causes? Under what conditions? And what kinds of investments do you need to make to get the most out of them?

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.

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.