Posts about Twitter
Twitter is a social network built around short status updates — a combination of microblogging and instant messaging, with the ability to post from mobile phones through text messages.
17 November 2009
Last week, Special Envoy to Sudan Gen. Scott Gration sat down with representatives from Save Darfur and the student network STAND for an unprecedented live Q&A, webcast directly from the White House website. The webcast was notable not just for its interactivity — members of both STAND and Save Darfur were encouraged to submit questions, which were then asked directly of Gration on air — but for its accountability.
8 April 2009
If organizers limit themselves to seeing Twitter as a strategy in and of itself — without considering the strategy apart from the tool — they risk overlooking ways to run a more effective campaign on other platforms, or augmenting a campaign using multiple platforms. Worse, organizers risk giving supporters feel-good activism that quenches their desire for social change without actually moving the movement closer to a concrete goal, or putting any pressure on powerholders.
The strategy always comes first, and then you figure out which tool fits. The alternative? A forest fire.
24 October 2008
In this presentation from the Democracy in Action Community Conference 2008, I talk about some of the successful approaches for nonprofits in using social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and social media like Flickr and YouTube. I give detailed examples of how the Genocide Intervention Network, where I served as director of communications and Internet strategy coordinator for four years, used social networking to achieve its goals in membership development, advocacy and fundraising.
26 July 2008
"A place to capture and share ideas, experiment with and exchange links and resources about the adoption challenges, strategy, and ROI of nonprofits and social media." Beth Kanter explores the social use by nonprofits of images (e.g., FlickrFlickr is a social media site for photographs and digital images. Like a social network, it allows users to "friend" one another, join groups, and see a recent-updates feed of their own and their friends' images. Flickr is owned by Yahoo!.), video (YouTubeYouTube is a social network built around posting, sharing, rating and commenting on videos.) and microblogs (TwitterTwitter is a social network built around short status updates — a combination of microblogging and instant messaging, with the ability to post from mobile phones through text messages.), among other technologies.
