Yep, social media (or Web 2.0) is everywhere these days, but it is not easy to get your arms around. For those of us not born to the Internet, here are some resources that help explain social media and suggest ways nonprofits can use it.
Beth Kanter is a consultant who works with nonprofits to help them understand and use social media. Her blog tracks many of her own experiments using social media to raise awareness and money for causes she champions.
This resource at ProBlogger has a ton of free material about blogging. This blog is not aimed at nonprofits but the info is quite useful anyway. A good place to start if you haven't started blogging yet.
This blog post is from NetSquared and written by Britt Bravo. The post actually gives 10 ways for nonprofits to use blogs, from reporting back from a conference to (my favorite) how to raise money with blogs. There are some great stats too on the demographics of people who read blogs.
For the intellectuals out there who want to understand the philosophical as well as technical underpinnings of social media, there is Jim McGee's "A dozen papers you should read in the world of Enterprise 2.0." Among my favorites are "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and "The Long Tail." Plan a weekend for browsing this challenging material.
This is a study from the U of Mass at Dartmouth about how nonprofits are working with social media. Some exciting stats from the study include that seventy-five percent of the nonprofits studied are using some form of social media including blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking, video blogging and wikis. More than a third of the organizations are blogging and forty-six percent report social media are very important to their fundraising strategy.
Godin produced this
"cheat" sheet about six things a nonprofit can do today to take full advantage of social media.
In 2006, the Pew Internet Project produced a report,
"Riding the Waves of Web 2.0." The report is a good overview of social media and its history. It also cuts through the hype surrounding social media and shows how Web 2.0 is not a brand new creature but is built on ground we already know well.
