Web 2.0

By Andrew Cohen

Successful online communities require more than a software package. In this article, we outline the strategies and features that can help you build online message boards, social networks, or other conversation based sites that become vibrant, useful communities.

This article is courtesy of Idealware, which provides candid information to help nonprofits choose effective software. For more articles and reviews, go to www.idealware.org.

These days, an organisation can create an online community site in minutes. But creating an actual online community takes much longer.

courtesy of Techsoup.org

Sometimes when you come across something online, you just know it's a gem that needs to be shared. This is one of those items. Chris Brogan put together a really comprehensive list of 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice on his blog about community and social media. It's chock full of good advice, day-to-day practice, tools to streamline your processes, and an abundance of comments with even more good tips from the peanut gallery.

Some of the things off his list that I've found most useful when developing social media strategy for nonprofits are:

• Build an editorial calendar to think about your posting schedule and subject matter.
• On all your presence points, be human, and write a human-sounding profile. Use a human-seeming profile picture. (Did I mention “human?”)
• Use tagging and other metadata to improve your blog’s search features. Most newer blog software has this built in. If not, look for plugins.
• To create consistent content, read daily, and not just for your industry. Skim, synthesize, and post.
• Invite your audience in to guest post where appropriate.
• Look for cross-promotional opportunities for like-minded blogs in your space.
• Set 3 month goals to review progress with upper management. Determine if this is having any impact.
• Though these last 10 tips are about numbers, NEVER treat people like numbers in social media.

Overall, he's got great tips and things to think about when developing your own social media strategy. Check out his list of 50 steps and think about the ones most valuable to your organization. Now, the big challenge is finding someone to add a few extra hours to the day so there's time to do them all!

By Eric Leland, April 2008

A map can be worth a thousand words. If you're looking for ways to create maps or to display geographic data, there are a number of software package that can help, from free ones to complex and powerful ones. This article, part of our A Few Good Tools series, provides a summary of the software that is used and liked by the Idealware community. They may not be the very best of their kind, but they have worked well for us. Perhaps they will also work for you.

Sprout is a free Web-based authoring platform that enables anyone to quickly and easily build widgets, mashups, mini-sites, banners and other forms of interactive and distributable web content. Users create “sprouts” by dragging and dropping rich media such as video, audio, images, text, shapes, and interactive services such as Twitter, Ribbit, PollDaddy and more.

Social media isn’t always the right tool for the job. Not every company needs a blog. YouTube worked for BlendTec, but it might not work for your company. And yet, there’s something to this. Over the last three days, I’ve spoken to four HUGE brands in America that are considering social media for one project or another, and there are many more out there working on how these tools might integrate into their business needs. Here’s a list of 50 ideas (in no particular order) to help move the conversation along. Note: I mix PR and Marketing. They should get back together again.

The term ‘broadband’ is widely used but often an explanation of what it actually means is hard to find. Currently there are several technologies that are given the term ‘broadband’ but they are quite different in terms of speed and the method they are connected to homes and businesses throughout Australia.

These days there are a huge range of services and providers on the market including bundling your phone and internet services. The term ‘naked’ has made its way into the market and basically it means using you phone line for data only and not using it for standard voice services. This then means that you use the internet to make phone calls (Voice over internet protocol) but we’ll cover that in another article.

So let’s break down the most common connections that are currently on offer from internet service providers (ISP’s) in Australia from slowest to fastest connections and examine some of the key features to look for in an internet service provider...

Click here to read more...

Check out Doug’s blog. Doug is the Chief Executive Officer of Connecting Up Australia ( formerly CISA). Doug has a wealth of knowledge and experience in the government and nonprofit sectors and naturally many opinions and insights to go with it! Doug’s undying passion to build the capacity of the nonprofit sector has seen his vocal advocacy drive the issues forward both in government and other forums. One of Doug’s greatest strengths is

• Beth’s workshop – Take Me To the Social Web

• Beth’s Day 2 Key Note Presentation – (Play Video)

• Qik – videocast http://qik.com/video/82161

• Beth’s Blog http://www.bethkanter.org/

See some of the popular web 2.0 or social web tools in this section. Click on them to find out more and have a go.

The best way to start to understand these tools and what they can do for you and your organisation is to have a go at using some of them.

Go on....join the bloggers, twitters or just subscribe to receive RSS feeds on your favourite topics of interest!

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