An Amazing NpTech Social Media Link Buffet: Take Your Pick!

 
Chinese Buffet by Drunken Monkey

During the past two weeks, links shared via the #nptech hashtag on Twitter have been like a Chinese buffet, a huge selection of tempting dishes that look so good you want to fill an entire plate.   And because you probably can't eat that much - unless, of course, you're Joey Chestnut - you put many small samples on your plate instead.  

I wish I had the capacity to write a blog post about each of these links below.  But that would be a lot of content!  I've been retweeting a lot of these links, but I also like to look for patterns and the best way to do that is aggregate them in a single blog post.   So, here's a few samplings from my digital buffet.   Take your pick!

Events

Twestival Local Weekend: Last February, Twestival raised over $250,000 for charity:water on Twitter on February 13th with more 200 cities sponsoring local tweet, meet, and give parties.  Starting today and through the weekend, Twestival will rock on, with over 200 local Twestivals happening supporting tweetups to raise money for a designated local charity.   A few examples - TwestivalDC, BostonTwestival, SFTwestival, and so many more.

9/11: With President Obama planning to formally declare September 11th  for the first time as a federally recognized National Day of Service and Remembrance, thousands of organizations around the nation are already mobilizing Americans to engage in service and perform good deeds in observance of the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.    This site, MyGoodDeed is encouraging people to pause and share their plans for a personal good deed.  You can even add a good deed widget for your site.

ServiceNation, a national campaign to increase service opportunities and elevate the importance of service in America, has received a $500,000 grant from Facebook as part of its expanded partnership. Facebook’s grant will encourage users of the social network to learn more about service opportunities through ServiceNation’s Facebook Page and connect with MyNation, a new, online social-networking community on ServiceNation.org being launched in preparation for the first National Day of Service on September 11, 2009.

Mozilla Week of Service Begins September 14th:  Mark your calendars and sign up to offer your geek skills to your local community for a service project this week.  I've been doing this for ten years as part of the annual NTEN Day of Service for the NTC.   To learn more about it, join the Mozilla crew and friends for a Twitter chat next Monday evening.

September is Preparedness Month:   We know that September is usually a bad month for hurricanes and other natural disasters.  The NY Chapter of the Red Cross offers Ten Tips in this YouTube Video.

NTEN has two fantastic events this month! The Online NTC takes place September 16-17th - get a special 25% discount here.  The conference will showcase NTEN's new book about mission-driven technology.  Steve Heye has been blogging chapters in the book for the past few weeks.  WeAreMedia Webinar on September 23rd - A Choose Your Own Expert Format!  Registration here.

Socap09 Still Buzzing:  Last week, the SoCap Conference generated a lot of buzz.  Susan Tenby from TechSoup shares her notes from the Unconference.  What was most sexy?  Metrics!  More from Stephanie McAuliffe's blog and SocialBrite.

NMC Future Symposium explore applications of techology that could impact issues of global importance over next five years or more.   They're encouraging folks to submit proposals.   (I'll be delivering the keynote, my first in a virtual 3d environment.)

PopTech Conference:  PopTech is one of the most renown annual gatherings of doers and thinkers in the world.  Mashable has dubbed it one of the best places to watch great minds in action. They also have a Fellows program - Nathaniel Whittemore has the scoop.

Gear Up For Giving from the Case Foundation is a month-long series of social media tutorials, to help nonprofits and their supporters understand how to use key tools and techniques to create awareness, catalyze civic action and cultivate new supporters and donors for their causes.  (I'll be participating in one at the end of the month).  Watch for news about the Case Foundation's second America's Giving Challenge. 

American Open Challenge is GlobalGiving's second online giving contest.  It's open to 501c3's serving U.S. communities can compete with each other by fundraising on the GlobalGiving site.  Projects working in the U.S. will have the opportunity to earn a spot on the GlobalGiving website if they mobilize supporters to raise $4,000 from at least 50 unique donors.  There is prize money available for the organizations attracting the most donors and funds.  You can read a case study about the winner of the first contest here.

Stop Complaining About Cause Fatigue!  Okay, with all these contests perhaps you're worried about Cause Fatigue.  Here's a systems way to think about the impact that such contests can create.

SocialGiving, a Ning app that allows for peer-to-peer fundraising initiatives for Ning Network Creators was launched this week by PincGiving.   Ning has been a popular platform for nonprofits to create communities of interest around their causes.  Manny Hernandez, author of Ning for Dummies, is the founder of tudiabetes and estudiabetes - two highly successful nonprofit communities on Ning.  Follow his blog for expert Ning advice.

CharityWater's BrandedFundraising Network:  Has done an impressive job raising money - over $200,000 to date.  One charity:water stakeholder has singlehandely raised $50,000 to celebrate his 50th birthday.

 Good Reads: Online

Charlene Li's latest slide deck about engagement, relationships, and social media.  The engagement pyramid on slide 15 reminds of the ladder of engagement.

Are social networks and social networking impairing our ability to learn? This was a question raised by a recent Stanford Study and debated over on Brian Solis's PR2.0 blog here and here.  Brian talks about how those of us active in the real-time Web experience an evaporation of attention span and our ability to digest and respond to everything that moves us.  I'm experiencing it - hence this buffet post.

Serendipity:   For a teacher, serendipity is taking your class to the woods to look for leaves & finding a giant, terrifying caterpillar. Is serendipity the potential value that comes from distraction?

The Hierachy of Distractions:  Just for fun! Come on, get distracted and read the post from Mashable.  (I knew there was a reason why I haven't taken the IPhone plunge yet).

Visual Mapping and Diagnostics for Scaling Change: From Steve Waddell, Iscale - this paper has done the impossible!   It has explained social network analysis and techniques in a way that is easy to understand for those who are not experts.  With the onslaught of information and greater complexity in our work, visual diagnostics are more and more important.  There's also a paper that Steve co-authored about a methodology for social network analysis.

How to Weave A Tighter Community from Angus Parker at WiserEarth.  After you have your social network analysis map in hand, here's some tips for putting the information into practice.

Inspiration

My Teacher, My Hero:  School is back in session.  To celebrate, you can create a video about a special teacher who inspired you.  I did.

Global Voices Bloggers Mentor Others.  I think it is really cool that Tharum, a Cambodian Blogger, is mentoring a Danish blogger launching a climate change blog!

Emily Troutman has just launched a new online art/journalism project with a social conscious.  It's called Why Congo Matters.

The Year That Changed the World from Michael Meyer was just published.

Metrics, Stats, Research, and Other Misc. Geekery

Facebook Picks:  If you have joined my Facebook Fan Page, then you'd know that I run more like a focus group where insights and links are shared.  Here's one I shared, an interview with Sarah Koch from Causes.

How do you measure sucess on Twitter? It used to be tough to gather rich metrics on a Twitter use. But as the Twitter has flourished, so has the number of ways to track success. This post from Marketing Profs gives you a couple tools and techniques for measuring your Twitter presence. A few tools mentioned:  Twinfluence, Twitalyzer, and TwitterEffect (which shows you how many people unfollowed or followed because of a specific tweet).  Take it all with grain of salt.

Twitter Demographics:  Last month, we learned that Teens Don't Tweet.  This month, ComScore revealed data that youth are overrepresented on Twitter.  Ah, one more screen capture for my social media research snippets.

SmallWorlds:  While I'm on the topic of ning, this newest project from GlobalKids embeds a 3-D Virtual world inside a Ning site.   Very cool.

BackUpMyTweets.  Since you can't retrace your tweets past a couple of months, this might be useful.  You could, if you remembered the words, search via google and add your Twitter ID. 

Comments

[Amy Yu]

Thanks for posting all of these, Beth. The Stanford study on how social media may impair our cognitive abilities was definitely something I found really interesting. I'm looking forward to reading Brian Solis' thoughts on this - thank you so much for the links. And thanks for highlighting CharityWater - they've done such an incredible job, and the Asian Liver Center's really looked to them as an example. (And under Twitter Demographics, I think you meant "Teens Don't Tweet," not "Tweets Don't Tweet" lol)

So much good information here. Thanks, again!

[Beth]

Now that has got to one of my more amusing typos!

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 6:12 PM, wrote:

[Angus Parker]

For those interested, I also wrote a how a post on what interventions to take as your network evolves called: What network stage in your community?.

[Angus Parker]

For those interested, I also wrote a post on what interventions to take as your network evolves called: What network stage is your community?

[Angus Parker]

For another take on an Engagement Pyramid similar to Charlene Li's have a look here.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=584273645]

Re: your reference to "Charlene Li's latest slide deck about engagement, relationships, and social media. The engagement pyramid on slide 15 reminds of the ladder of engagement." ...great slides.

Another excellent framework I work with was originated by Bill Snyder, a Community of Practice guru and friend. He talks about the "ecology of practice and learning" ...given all the ways we can interact, what are the "rhythms" of interactions that will make for a very robust (in my case) global change community network...given some forms of interactions appeal to some more than others, and some are more resource intense, and the issues of a CoP are of varying degrees of importance to people.