If you're heading to Portland on October 2nd for NetWits Live, I hope to see you there. I'll be joined by Holly Ross (Executive Director of NTEN), Allison Van Diest, and a super surprise mystery guest to present 4 sessions on hot Internet topics. If you do make it, feel free to use this forum to network with each other and continue the discussion after the event ends.

If you've stumbled into this thread, and have no idea what I'm talking about, please check out the Net Wits Live page. There's still time to register for this FREE event!

Not sure who's attending, but I'll be attending Holly Ross' session about Social Media - and Chad's session on real time social web.  (I'm hoping to catch Allison's presentation at the BB conference in November, as I'd love to attend all 4 NetWits sessions - but they're running at the same time).

 In the meantime, I'd be interested in meeting some attendees and getting feeback on the following topics I'm writing policy on currently:

• How do you determine what "social networking" your donors/prospects use - and which do you feel benefit your organization?
• Is your organization using Twitter and if so, who maintains it - and what is 'tweeted'? 
• How do you get more of your donors/prospects to follow your twitter?
• Good / bad examples of tweets
• Do you have different levels of email opt-outs (i..e, no newsletters, no appeals, no event notices) or is it all or nothing?  How do you track that in RE?
• For those using other web programs besides BBNC, what policies have you enacted to keep track of requests (like opt-out)?
• Do you track/send seperate emails for text versus HTML?
• For constituents with mailing addresses and emails, do you send them appeals to both locations?

Regards,

Joe

Here's my notes from the 10.2.08 NetWits conference:

• Holly Ross, Executive Director, NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network had a great presentation on Social Networking. 
• Twitter: Following OUR followers allows us to get an insight into what our followers say and think (and tweet). 
• If your org has donors/constituents following you, you also allow others to see who your donors/followers are, and other people can click their twitter account and follow/Direct Message them. But is that bad?  Probably not.  I think it’s equal to seeing your big donors sitting at the Gold Level table of 10 at your black-tie dinner.  Theoretically, anyone COULD talk to them – but most other non-profits probably wouldn’t. 
• Social networking doesn’t replace your email list.  
• Your blogs shouldn’t always be about your organization. 
• Capturing your constituents/donors social networking into your CRM is still something that is being developed.  There’s no exact science as to where/what is captured.  There’s no policy as to what you capture (do they blog? Are they on linkedin?) 
• Social Networking is messy.  There is no easy way to tell the source of someone’s tactics how someone comes across your Facebook page, twitter account, etc. 
• Davos attendees use qik to upload real-time videos from phone  
• Twitter can be referred to “Ambient Awareness” 
• Blogging will bring website hits in droves, driving awareness. Blogs / articles on your org website should have all possible “link to” at the bottom – allowing people to share the information on their Facebook, digg, etc, pages. 
• Chad Norman demonstrated Woopra.com - real-time Web tracking and analysis application.  Very Big-Brother-ish.  But Google Analytics is more extensive.
• There needs to be a set amount of time devoted to the practice of blogging and other social networking each day/week for it to be successful. 
• There’s no hard evidence on how to sell to an Executive Director or development department the benefits of social networking translating into donations.  It does happen – but there’s no direct path.  However it’s an emerging method of communications. 
• But it’s clear that there are so many new methods of communicating your organizations message – with donors – with prospects – that a communications department has an exponentially larger task than 3-5 years ago.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Joe