flickr: haglundcA community manager’s job is built on a foundation of distractions. 

Navigating the social web can feel a bit like walking through a water park on a Saturday in July with a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old who somehow keep running into their friends, when you really want to be back home developing a dinner strategy for Sunday. And did you see that ice cream vendor over there? Did his cooler have a QR code on it?

Making sense of the never-ending flow of information, keeping ourselves focused – all while ensuring that no one at the water park of our organization has a sunburn at the end of the day – involves a constant state of learning, adaptability, and growth.

Thanks to Net2 Think Tank, folks all over the web this month are sharing their best practices for effectively monitoring online feedback. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned along the way:

Flickr Photo: Mez LoveYou may have heard by now that we're raising money for scholarships to the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference. Last year was the first time we ran the campaign, and while we met our goal, it was a stretch, and we almost burnt ourselves out.

Flickr Photo: Duane StoreyJames Carville helped keep the Clinton campaign on message in 1992 by hanging a sign on Bill Clinton's door that read, in part, "The economy, stupid." That now-famous catchphrase is widely credited with giving the Clinton campaign its win. Although we don't know if it was ever taped up on any doors, I think the winning strategy for the Obama campaign was "Transparency, stupid!"

In this election, Obama rode a tidal wave of youth vote to the presidency, with 66% of voters under 30 casting their ballot for the Democrat. What the campaign realized, early and often, is that the under-thirty crowd communicates differently from the rest of us. As Allison Fine writes in Momentum, this group is "... likely to engage in two-way conversation with staff, volunteers, and clients, rather than in one-way broadcasts, the style of communication most often used by organizations now."

This meant two things for the campaign.

The folks over at NetSquared have been wondering: How can nonprofits use the social web during this giving season? I can think of dozens of examples. But I think that there's a larger opportunity here than simply starting a widget fundraising campaign or the like.

The big opportunity is this: amplify your authenticity.

In day-to-day fundraising, it's all about building relationships. Unless there is a big news headline, people give to the causes and organizations they have relationships with. And the relationships that work best are the authentic ones, those that are honest and real.