As budgets and fundraising levels for non-profits get smaller, more organizations are turning to using social networking online as an essential part of their overall marketing strategy. Non-profits see online social media as an inexpensive way to build relationships, increase involvement, and help out with publicity and education efforts.

According to the Nonprofit Social Network Survey conducted in March 2009 by NTEN, Common Knowledge, and ThePort, social networking has become an increasingly important part of nonprofits’ online strategy.

This survey provides a rare snapshot of how non-profit organizations are embracing and using social media online, and provides concrete evidence that the use of social networking is becoming essential to a successful non-profit marketing plan.

• Of the 929 survey respondents, nearly three-quarters (74.1%) of non-profits reported having a presence on Facebook, with an average community size of 5,391 members. YouTube (46.5%) and Twitter (43.2%) were cited as alternate social networking tools.
• Despite having decreased resources, staffing and budgets for social network marketing on commercial social networks, like Facebook, are real although relatively small. Over 80% of respondents are committing at least one-quarter of a full-time staff person to social networking online. Additionally, more than half (55%) of survey respondents intend to increase social networking staffing over the next twelve months.
• Funding for external resources dedicated to helping social networking online is also expected to increase, according to nearly one-quarter (24.1%) of respondents.
• The survey revealed that social networks provide little real revenue for non-profits via fundraising, and are mainly utilized for traditional marketing efforts (promoting their website, email lists, and events.)

Non-profit organizations are realizing that while social networking online may not directly translate into fundraising dollars, by using social networking as a part of their marketing plan, they are able to engage supporters and prospective donors by building relationships, as well as gaining trust and loyalty towards their cause. Social networking also allows non-profit organizations a cost effective way to promote events, educate and raise awareness, and ultimately, create an ongoing conversation and involvement between the organization and its supporters.

This content from: Freelance Social Media

Social Networking Online and Non-Profit Organizations

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I’ve seen recently that some advertisers are starting to use Twitter’s hashtags in their advertising. Land Rover used it in a recent campaign as mentioned on the Stuff That is Relevant Blog. Is this something that other advertisers will start to do as well? It reminds me of a time when advertisers only put their phone number or address on their advertising or products. With the creation of the Internet and corporate webpages, advertisers began adding their website URL’s to their advertising. Many also added their AOL keyword to their messages much in the way that some are beginning to add their Twitter hashes.

When I find old boxes I usually check to see how they display their company information, if I don’t see a website I know that it’s pre-Internet if I see an AOL keyword I say, “I remember that”. If advertisers use Twitter hashtags on their advertising and the next social media tool comes along to replace Twitter will we someday find an old ad or product and say, “Oh yeah, Twitter, remember that?”

Have you witnessed hashtags in advertisements? Please share!

This content from: Freelance Social Media

Land Rover Hashtag-Twitter Hashtags in Advertisements

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Twitter

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I was browsing popular hashtags a couple of weeks ago and found the tag #gno to be the most popular. Of course the first thing I wondered was what gno meant. After some researching I found that it stood for Girls Night Out and was created by founders Carissa Rogers and Jyl Johnson Pattee.

According to Jyl, “In mid September, Carissa suggested we get on twitter for a “girl’s night out” with a couple of online friends to learn the twitter ropes together. We thought it’d be more fun to practice while tweeting to each other than to some unknown tweople. Since Carissa had been on twitter for a whole 2 weeks LOL!, she was our mentor.”

The next Tuesday night, which they referred to as Girls Night Out, 10 people showed up. It wasn’t until the third week when they learned about applying a hashtag that they added #GNO and 50 more showed up.

“At the end of October, #gno gals asked for a place where we could capture each other’s names and twitter IDs, so party goers could follow each other. This resulted in the birth of the Mommy Gossip—GNO blog. My personal blog is called Mommy Gossip and we thought it’d work perfectly for the name of our blog. So, we called it Mommy Gossip—GNO (http://mommygossip-gno.blogspot.com). Carissa and I have not written much on the blog. Instead, we wanted to use it—when we weren’t using it to promote #gno parties or capturing RSVP info—as a way to promote community members’ blogs. The blog has now been up for 4 months and features five guest bloggers a week in addition to promoting the #gno weekly events. Also, it has a couple of other pages, including the “Cares” page (http://mommygossip-cares.blogspot.com), which highlights past, current, and future ways the newly named Mom It Forward community is reaching out and changing the lives of others.”

What Is Mom It Forward and how does it tie into #gno?
“We get this question all the time. In a nutshell, #gno and its weekly parties started because of a few girl’s desire to learn twitter. Mom It Forward started when Carissa and I noticed an amazing trend during those parties. We started choosing weekly party topics in October and asking guest tweets (“experts”) to tweet with us during the events. We noticed that some topics were hotter than others. We were amazingly surprised when service and giving and random acts of kindness seemed to be the hottest topics of all. We found this out first, by having an online virtual food drive to raise money for feedingamerica.org in November and second, when we issued a random acts of kindness challenge to community members in December. We noticed that if we chose a fun topic like shopping and discussed it at #gno, it would be fun for the evening. But, when we chose a topic or event that was service related, it stayed hot for weeks at a time. That is when the idea to focus the community on a service-related mission—of “changing the world one mom at a time”—was created. We came up with the name Mom It Forward in December.

But again, how do the two tie together? Mom It Forward has three purposes: 1) to strengthen moms, 2) to help moms strengthen their families, and 3) to provide moms with ideas for and opportunities to strengthen their communities and beyond. We see #gno as a great way to achieve all of these. We choose monthly themes with weekly topics that support those themes. We are careful in choosing themes and topics we feel help to achieve these three purposes. So, although a specific #gno topic may seem trivial, it is all very calculated and well balanced—physically, socially, emotionally, spiritually, and/or mentally.”-Jyl

How many people follow #gno now?
“I can tell you we have well over 300 followers on our Mom It Forward website. We have well over 100 people who RSVP for a Tuesday night #GNO directly on the website, and then there are 150+ who RSVP via facebook invites, but do they overlap? I’m not sure?
There are around 350 members of our Mom It Forward Facebook group.”

On Tuesday nights we tweet as high as 500 tweets per minute, and often hold at around 2-300 tweets per minute well into the night! How many more are watching and not participating? Who knows!” -Carissa

This content from: Freelance Social Media

#GNO the most popular hashtag every Tuesday night

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“Today, we’re launching our first social widget for Facebook Connect, the Comments Box. The Comments Box is a great way for any website, blog or photo gallery to add social comments to their page in just a minute with a few lines of code. We want to help bring you social widgets that make it easier for users to communicate and share across your site and with their friends on Facebook. ” -Facebook Developers Blog

How To: Create a Comments Box with Facebook Connect in 5 Minutes from Pete Bratach on Vimeo.

This content from: Freelance Social Media

Facebook Connect Launches First Widget

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Webmasters looking to add social features to their websites can now do so with Google’s Friend Connect. Once it’s set up on your site, users can log in using their Google, AOL, Yahoo, or OpenID account…no need to create another username and password. Currently it only offers a few “gadgets” but I’m sure it will be rolling out more down the road. It will be intersting to see if it takes much market share from Ning which is a finished product for end users.

As a matter of fact, Ning’s co-founder Marc Andresseen said in a blog post last May “First, I’m very happy to say that Ning will be rolling out our formal production support for Open Social in June.

In case you missed the news at the time, Open Social is a standard way, sponsored by Google, to build new features (“gadgets”) and/or plug those features into social networks all over the web, including social networks on Ning.”

This content from: Freelance Social Media

Google Friend Connect

Technorati Tags: friend connect, ning

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Butterball has gotten into the social media game this holiday season with its “turkey texts.”  For those of you needing cooking advice you can sign up to receive tips on your cell phone.

Sign Up for Turkey Text Messages

Sign up to have text messages from Turkey Talk-Line experts sent straight to your phone. There are four easy ways to sign up:

1. Enter your mobile phone number on the homepage.
2. Visit www.butterball.com on your mobile phone and enter your mobile phone number on the homepage.
3. Or, text the word “TURKEY” to the number 36888 from your phone.
4. If you have created a profile on Butterball.com, sign up on your profile page.

Receive Turkey Text Messages

Once you’ve signed up, you will receive text messages from November 3 to December 31, 2008.* Each message will include:

* Tips on how to prep and cook a turkey.
* Reminders on when to buy and start thawing your turkey.
* Shopping list alerts for new recipes.
* Features to instantly connect to the Butterball Experts
o Click to call 1-800-BUTTERBALL∗ directly from within the text message to speak with an expert.
o Or, click through to the mobile site to quickly get more information.

This content from: Freelance Social Media

Butterball Does Social Media With Turkey Texts!

Technorati Tags: Social Media

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Over the last year Obama’s campaign was all over the internet. He was in people’s inboxes, on their Facebook pages, in Youtube videos, etc. The bottom line is Obama got it. He understood the power of the internet and the quote below proves it.

In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face.Always game for something new, Mr. Andreessen headed to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear the guy out. A junior member of a large and powerful organization with a thin, but impressive, résumé, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.

He wondered if social networking, with its tremendous communication capabilities and aggressive database development, might help him beat the overwhelming odds facing him.

“It was like a guy in a garage who was thinking of taking on the biggest names in the business,” Mr. Andreessen recalled. “What he was doing shouldn’t have been possible, but we see a lot of that out here and then something clicks. He was clearly supersmart and very entrepreneurial, a person who saw the world and the status quo as malleable.”

And as it turned out, President-elect Barack Obama was right.

Source: NY Times-How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks

This content from: Freelance Social Media

Obama Reiterates the Power of Social Networks

Technorati Tags: obama, social networks

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According to an article written by Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb, professional social media consultants don’t make less than $150 an hour.

“No one we surveyed named an hourly consulting rate below $150 per hour. $300 per hour was the most common rate named. Some listed monthly rates of $2k to $4k per engagement, which we assume probably means 20 to 40 hours per month.

Social media (or in many cases Search Engine Optimization) consulting is probably making a fair number of people six figures. What are these people doing? They are advising companies on how to set up and run blogs, how to reach out to and relate to bloggers, how to use Twitter (seriously) and how to make advanced use of RSS. The SEO work is probably the most technical, but degrees of technical challenge are all relative. A lot of this work is about communication skills.”

This content from: Freelance Social Media

So just how much do social media consultants get paid?

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Tyler over at SMMGuru offered up the top 198 social media sites.  We’d like to add a couple to the list: Macblips and HypeM

Sports Entertainment
Fighters
Ballhype
eFans
FanNation
Fanspot
ScoreGuru
SportsFlip
Sportsvite
SportsCast

Social Bookmarking
Blinkbits
Blinklist
Blogmarks
Chipmark
Connectedy
del.icio.us
De.lirio.us
Diigo
Foxmarks
Furl
Lycos iQ
Ma.gnolia
Mobilicio.us
Netvouz
OnlyWire
Shadows
Simpy
Socializer
Windows Live Favorites
Automotive
AutoSpies
Boompa
CarDomain
Motorpulse
Graduation Related
Classmates
ConnectU
Friends Reunited
Graduates
Meetup
Consumer Opinions
Cork’d
Chowhound
Epinions
Yelp

Food & Cooking
All Recipes
Barmano
FohBoh
Foods.tv
Kitchen Bug

Social Dating
Chemistry
Crush or Flush
Cupid’s Lab
Flirtomatic
SpeedDate
WooMe
Learning / Education / Reading
BookCrossing
Bookins
BookMooch
BookSwim
Carmun
Citeulike
Connect via Books
Good Reads
Hitflip
LibraryThing
Shelfari
Wordsy
Family
Babbiz
Eons
Family 2.0
Famiva
Geni
Genoom
GreatSchools
Kinzin
MomJunction
MothersClick
Moxie Moms
MyFamily.com
Parentography

Style & Fashion
Chictini
Stylehive
Threadless
Networking
AIM Pages
Bebo
Facebook
Faves
Friendster
Grono
Hi5
LiveJournal
NetFriendships
Netlog
Orkut
Passado
ProfileLush
Skyrock
Tagged
Windows Live Spaces
Yahoo! 360
Zaadz

Health & Medicine
DailyStrength
Health Ranker
MyPharmaNote
Walker Tracker
Who is Sick?
Online Marketing
PlugIM
Sphinn
BloggingZoom
Link Shares
Blue Dot
Philoi
StumbleUpon
TagTooga
Trailfire
Micro/Mobile
FlickIM
IMified
Jaiku
Komoo – Chinese
loopt
mbuzzy
Pownce
Radar
Twitter
Zannel
Music
10Tune
JamNow
Jango
Indistr
Last.fm
MOG
Purevolume
Soundpedia
thesixtyone
Social News Sites
BlogsVine
BuzzFlash
Content Pop
Digg
Fark
Hubdub
Mixx
Newsvine
NowPublic
Plime
Propeller
RawSugar
Reddit
Shoutwire
Animals
Catster
Dogster
Fuzzster
MyCatSpace
MyDogSpace
PetSide
Photos
Flickr
Fotki
Fotolog
Linkinn
My Opera
Photbucket
Tagmee
Zoomr
Professional Sites
APSense
Biznik
CompanyLoop
DoMyStuff
Doostang
KillerStartups
Lawyrs
LinkedIn
MeetIn
NetHooks
PairUp
StartupNation
Startupping
Real Estate
Trulia
Zillow
Zolve
Tech. Industry
CSS Globe
DesignRelated
DevelopersNiche
Hacker News
Slashdot
Tweako
SWiK
Teens
eCRUSH
eSpintheBottle
Profile Heaven
Student.com
Stardoll
Teenwag
Travel/Vaction
TravBuddy
Travellerspoint
Trip Advisor
Woophy
Video
Broadcaster
Friction.tv
Revver
Tubearoo
Viddler
Video Bomb
Video Sift
Vimby
YouTube

This content from: Freelance Social Media

Top 200 Social Media Sites by Niche

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Whether it be for a product or your business, in general, Facebook Pages can be essential in social marketing. With Pages you can display videos, pictures, and have “fans” of your page write reviews and discuss your product. You can also spice up the page with flash and can even use some html. However, it’s not called html, it’s called FBML. Facebook’s own coding:

Another benefit to Pages is fans can opt-in to receive messages from you.

This content from: Freelance Social Media

Using Facebook Pages as a marketing tool

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