This is especially urgent given that much of the action is now taking place away from your own (increasingly irrelevant ) website, ‘out there’, in social networks and online communities. Perhaps the “buzz director” label (which was always just a working title) sounds too marketing-centric; I don’t mean it to be; buzz directors need to be able to apply this thinking to online communities and activist networks. I thought it was about time to re-visit the role of the “buzz director” - flesh out the role I first floated last October.

Last week Seth Godin wrote a post suggesting that the #1 job for the future is being an online community organizer . With all the hoopla around MySpace, Facebook and social networking these days, it seems like everybody wants to start their own "community." So here it goes, the Top Five Things to Ask When Your Nonprofit Wants to Start a Community: 1. He's probably right. Next week, Katya Andresen is hosting the weekly Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants created by Kivi Leroux Miller .

I only recently stumbled across the Dog Trust’s photo-sharing community, DoggySnaps.com . We have an active community who are emotionally engaged and very responsive to the website, newcomers and new features, which is fantastic for such a young site. A large proportion of feedback from users is incorporated into new developments - ‘emoticons’ in the new forums , private and public messaging in ‘kennels’ , information about the actual owner… I’m not a dog owner, and frankly have no particular affinity with dogs, but the fabulous design, adoption of features such as tagging , and impressive attention to detail all made an instant impact on me.

In 2007, as we were revving up for the annual conference in DC, a bunch of us signed up for Twitter accounts and used them -- to mixed success -- for casual announcements, off-agenda organizing and "Hey, what session are you in?" Joining Twitter with a good chunk of my social/professional community was definitely a boon. For me, this has primarily Skeptics take note - I agree with you that Twitter , the " microblogging " service that your friends are pressuring you to join, appears to be the ultimate synthesis of vanity and wasted time. All of that potential is there, and, worse,

2. Use Your Nonprofit Blog to Create Your Own Media Coverage When the men accused of murdering Gwen Araujo, a woman they beat, bound and strangled after they discovered that she was biologically male, went to trial, the Community United Against Violence decided to use a blog to document the trial. write for the NetSquared blog each day (it takes me anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour depending on the topic), but it is also designed to be a community blog, so any registered user can post on it about how nonprofits are using the social web for social change.

Now Childline , which merged with the NSPCC last year, has created the Childline Zen Garden room in Habbo Hotel - a virtual community for teenagers. She hopes the partnership with Habbo will drive traffic to the NSPCC website , as well as encouraging members of the community to take part in polls and design an anti-bullying themed room. I’ve written previously about how the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children ( NSPCC ) has embraced innovation to raise awareness of its cause. The child protection charity hopes that its three-month stay in

Returning to the DoggySnaps example… what started as a photo-sharing community has the potential to evolve into a dynamic social network. PR Blogger Stephen Davies thinks we’ll start to see a fragmentation of social networks. As people begin to tire with the vast, general nature of MySpace et al , they may migrate to niche social networks that are more relevant to them, their passions and their lives.

The Austin Game Developers Conference is finishing up, and from it comes Gamasutra's intriguing account of the session on Engaging and Empowering Community Influencers. In gaming, especially MMOs (massively multiplayer online games, like World of Warcraft), the social component--supported by bulletin boards, community sites, and in-game social areas--plays a major role in how the game is perceived, and, by extension, its success. The players who talk to the most other players are often more influential than those with the highest scores, and game design firms are starting to consciously cultivate and support their influence.

A place that truly sees these initiatives as part of their mission to serve their local community. Today, an interview with Shelley Bernstein , the Manager of Information Systems at the Brooklyn Museum, and the engine behind that museum’s fabulous forays into Web 2.0. Tell me about the background for the Brooklyn Museum’s community web component. Everything here is mission-driven, and we have a mission that’s very much about the visitor experience and community. Let’s say you wanted to find a model museum using Web 2.0 to support programs and exhibits.

Largely an interview with Jonathon Colman of The Nature Conservancy, the article focuses on how building trust and presence in online communities can build actual, countable page views on your website: Jonathon describes a campaign where his social networking promotion of a website article earned it 16 thousand views in a single day. Their efforts focused around starting a MySpace page and delivering news, updates, donation requests, and invitations to events to their MySpace community. A few years ago, when web tools were just beginning to allow the interactive environments we're seeing everywhere today, I wrote a piece called Bread and Butter 2.0.