In the beginning, if you wanted to be part of the conversation, you just had to know what was going on. You had to know about emerging platforms, you had to listen to the conversation and respond when necessary. But that was the old minimum. The new minimum is participation.

Live note-taking of the South By Southwest Interactive panel discussion "A Global Conversation: Free Agents and Noprofits in a Networked World." Panel discussion moderated by Beth Kanter, including Danielle Brigida, Mark Horvath and Jessica Dheere.

A Facebook Page is a community, but it is usually a loosely-tied community of lurkers and inactives who don't have the opportunity to interact with each other or the Page often enough. I believe that you can create community within a Facebook Page, but it takes a lot of work, discovery, and dedication. Here are 5 tips to creating community within your Facebook Page.

Social media is ALL about engagement. However, it's not so easy to create engagement. A comprehensive social media strategy should include an engagement strategy on every platform that adds value to your fans and creates deeper loyalty. This blog post summarizes the essential elements to designing an engagement strategy on each social media channel, and a slideshow to illustrate the main concepts.

YouTube announced today that every YouTube channel is now equipped with a moderator feature, allowing YouTube to become fully social and engaging. It's a game changer, and this post tells you why.

In this post, I talk about 10 social media trends that I'm seeing, and examples of those trends including fear of failure, mounting case studies, acceptance of ROI, employee use of social media, and more.

This guest blog post continues the discussion of nonprofit collaboration, but from the funder's perspective. Guest contributor Ed Nicholson, who manages corporate philanthropy for Tyson Foods, offers his perspective on why collaboration and coopetition is good for the cause and the funder.

Two data sets, two different user groups, same results: Small businesses and nonprofit find social media effective for reaching new customers and strengthening existing relationships. Irrefutable evidence of the power of engagement.

Active management of an online community on a registered site or social network translates into quantifiable value for the sponsoring organization. This blog post offers value data from two online communities that lost active community managers, and the subsequent effects on both the community and value from the community to the sponsoring organization.

As more and more holiday video cards emerge, I take a look at the two types of video cards: humorous and serious. In this post, I mention my favorites from this holiday season of 2009, and why.