What if everyone who works at an organization, or cares deeply about a cause or organization, acted as a network weaver? How would that change the way that organizations communicate? How would that change how and the extent to which organizations raise funds online? That was just the conversation that I had in mind when my colleague Scott Remington and I presented a working session at the Jewish Federation Young Leadership Conference. We had one overarching goal: to empower every person in the room to become a network weaver. In this blog post, I overview the presentation and its five primary segments: redefining leadership, developing your own brand, mapping your own network, the network weaver and online fundraising, and two case studies of network weavers succeeding with online fundraising.

At the North American Jewish Day School Conference, I offered a session entitled "Redefining Community Leadership for an Online World." The session explored how traditional "offline" organizations might open their communities beyond the those tied to the brick-and-mortar building, to include online fans, friends, and followers. In particular, I wanted to grapple with the sticky questions of sharing leadership, merging online community with offline, the value online leaders might bring to a bricks-and-mortar school, and for what purpose. On other words, I wanted to explore the broadest, most generous definition of "community," and the role that community can play in the development and enrichment of a traditional organization tied to a physical and geographic location. In this blog post, I consider who is the "legitimate community," how to identify and vet your online community leaders, and how to support those leaders within your virtual communities. The blog post also includes the embedded slide deck from my conference session.

On Tuesday, I presented a session entitled "Leadership and Your Social Media Voice" at the North American Jewish Day School Conference. Based on the conference theme of "Leading to Learn, Learning to Lead," I offered the session as a conversation-starter for educators who are thinking about or currently using social media personally on behalf of their organizations. I wanted to answer these questions through the content and conversation: Why should educational staff use social media personally yet professionally, how could translate leadership from offline to online, and could I offer a "playbook" of sorts that to design their professional online presence and voice?

Last week, I presented on the topic of "Bringing Social Inside" through Nonprofit Webinars. I developed the presentation out of a belief that successful social media strategy and implementation must also have certain supportive foundations inside the organization. The core components are staffing, budget, a supportive culture, and some basic social media policies. Most organizations I've worked with have at least one of these four components, and very few have all four. This blog post walks through these elements, and includes a slide presentation illustrating many of the core components and supporting research.

ast week, Marc Baizman and I offered a workshop at the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network's annual conference this week called "Streamlining Nonprofit Organizations: It's All About the Cloud." Cloud computing allows you to access software from anywhere via the Internet, instead of your hard drive or local computer network (definition courtesy of TechSoup). Within the presentation (below), Marc and I focused on cloud adoption barriers, strategies for succeeding in the cloud, two nonprofit case studies, and a survey of cloud tools. In both case studies that on nonprofits that successfully moved into the cloud, the critical elements were collaboration and management support. It's interesting that these same two elements are critical for social media success as well.

How might we use content to develop and deepen community within our own own social media channels? What content do people REALLY engage with, why is that, and who is engaging? With the right approach, any organization should be able to identify content that engages its community, optimize it, and create deeper community engagement using community-based content curators. Knowing which questions to ask and what data to track is the first stage of content-based community-building. Knowing how to optimize it for community-building is the goal.

This Spring, the Multnomah County Library Levy Campaign Committee and consulting firm Winning Mark created and ran a successful place-based advocacy campaign to pass a library-preservation ballot measure. Emphasizing check-ins, recommendations, and making personal connections online, the campaign strategy paid off in a 4:1 win. This blog post walks through the strategy, complete with screenshots, lessons learned, and approach.

I've often been struck by the idea that geosocial (geolocation) applications are an incredible opportunity for organizational engagement...waiting to happen. The sharp smartphone adoption curve, the increasing cultural acceptance of online location sharing, and abundance of geosocial apps creates a ripe environment for community-building.According to geolocal mobile research, people check in primarily to receive coupons or discounts, and secondarily to meet friends, it's the third reason that is the missed opportunity. The third most-popular reason people use a geosocial app to check in is to promote a location. Close to 30% of the people who check in do so because they love the business. This seems pretty like huge opportunity to deepen engagement, but I see two huge missed opportunities.

On Friday, I gave a presentation on the impact of social media on journalism. The session was entitled "Is Social Media the New News?" and my role was to offer the 10,000-foot view on how social media is impacting the newspaper industry. During the presentation, I identified four areas impacted by social media: the changing definition of an authoritative news source, the concept of news participators, how news is shared, and the changing news cycle. I noted that the two concepts of who is a news authority, and authority vs. trust are disproportionately affecting how the news is shared, the news cycle, and the relationship of news consumers to news organizations.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to offer a workshop on the topic of creating a social media strategy to a group of budding entrepreneurs. It's a big, meaty topic, and no two strategies are ever developed in the same way. Over the years, I've developed a methodology of what goes into strategy development, and focused on that methodology for the workshop. There are four elements to developing a social media strategy: evaluating current organizational assets, researching competitors (and comparables), choosing appropriate channels for ongoing participation, and measurement. I might add developing online campaigns (as relevant) to that mix. This post discusses those key elements, and includes a comprehensive slide deck of the presentation that I gave.