Social media cannot thrive in silos. What is happening online affects the entire organization, not just the marketing department, or the development team, or the Executive Director. And while social media usage has truly penetrated the nonprofit sector, reports and activities are usually not shared throughout the organization. What results is a lack of organizational buy-in, misunderstanding of the benefit of digital engagement, missed opportunities, and role confusion. Instead of siloing information, turn it around. Knowledge sharing results in stronger organizations that have a broader knowledge base about its online stakeholders, and a wide net of useful information to meet organizational goals.

In social media, missing steps lead to frustration with using social media and sometimes complete disbelief in its use or good for the organization. More often than not, if the strategy isn't working, there are missing steps. This blog post includes four slides that outline steps to creating a comprehensive, goal-oriented social media presence and strategy.

The National Wildlife Federation uses free online listening tools to compile a powerful listening dashboard and stay on top of trends, mentions, and fan activity. This blog post summarizes the key points from their presentation at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference session.

The Listening workshop at the Nonprofit Technology Conference covered more than the tools: it was a point of view about why listening is critical to any organization. Wendy Harman discussed how the American Red Cross thinks about listening: it is critical to the relevancy of the organization, internal development, professional development, and reputation management.

What are the essential online listening tools you need? In this post, I discuss the six essential FREE tools that also offer email alert features. However, the other secret is listening through RSS feeds. Find out how and why you want to each of these listening tools.

How does your organization use the social bookmarking site Delicious? In this post, we discuss the ways that your organization can use Delicious for information gathering, intra company collaborative efforts, and sharing news with stakeholders.

How do you gather and process all the online information that you need to know? I've compiled and explained my news gathering and processing system in this blog post in order to share insights that I've learned. What I'm hoping is that, after you read this, you'll share yours in the comments or with your own blog post. I look forward to learning and sharing with you!

Reputation management is not just a tool for defensive online listening, but to alert us when good things are said about our company online. Two days ago, I found out that I won an industry award solely because my company was mentioned and hyperlinked from another site. How did I find out? A Google Alert I had set up notified me. In this post, I discuss the importance of effective listening posts, using my award as an example of "the flip side of reputation management."

When recently presenting an overview of social media to a nonprofit organization, I was met with overwhelming fears and objections to using social media. This post addresses each concern one by one, revealing why you can't afford not to be active in social media.

The NTEN National Technology Conference 2009 Session on Mapping Social Media to Metric offered to opportunity to lean how nonprofit organizations are listening, utilizing social media, measuring their efforts and adapting their efforts based on what they are learning. In this post, I captured the session's conversations and lessons learned from the social media practitioners in the field.