Social Media Reading - 061409

• Using Social Media in Your Nonprofit - Overcoming Objections - I hear #5 most often - People will attack us online with negative critique. The organization that I work for has been bitten in the past with very negative critique. In fact, blog posts still persist that are highly negative of the organization. - Great ideas for comebacks on some of the things you might hear from your executive staff.
• Engaging Major Donors Online - Two main ideas: 1) don't be afraid to ask for larger amounts, especially if you can customize the ask to a previous gift and 2) customize part of your web site to cultivate major donors - including inviting them to be involved, submit content, etc.
• How Big is Your Farm - Great analogy between farming and marketing. In farming, if you only have the money to buy a few bags of seed, you don't spread it out over several acres. You choose wisely about where to plant. With all the online marketing tools and web sites, it's easy to be tempted to spread out your spend over 10-15 sites instead of choosing one (or a few) and winning.
• 3 Inspiring Social Media Case Studies - With a targetted approach, Network Solutions dropped their negative comments ratio from 58% to 18% - mostly by participating in blogs, forums and twitter.
• Not Everyone is Excited about Facebook Vanity URLs - I understand Marshall's concern about digital identity. I was one of the first people to register my name on Friday evening. I had it locked up within the first minute. But, I have no plans to send people to that URL or to limit myself to Facebook being my only means of expression online. To me, it's just a cool thing to have. And now, if I want to send a friend to my Facebook page, it's much easier than it used to be.

Tips and Tricks:

• What the Hashtag?! - Can't say enough about how much I love this site and it's ability to aggregate all of the tweets to a specific hashtag. The transcript feature is probably the best part about it.
• iGoogle - Step by Step Instructions from Carrie Lewis (HSUS) on how to set up an iGoogle page to effective track your brand online
• Change.org Non-profit Accounts Explained
• Tweet Grid - Web-based Twitter Search Dahsboard - Haven't tried this yet. Going to try it out this week.
• #Fail - Twisig.com - I tried this over the weekend. In theory, it creates a "signature" file of your latest tweet that is automatically updated. Two problems I ran into: a) the box isn't big enough for a 140 character tweet and was overlapping information and b) all of a sudden earlier today, they said my twitter account didn't exist