I've been thinking a lot about the concept of social media ROI, and how to measure it. Can we measure effective engagement with stakeholders, and how we move them to action? For social media, the ROI is actually Return on Engagement (ROE). All other activities are those leading to ROE.

What prevents ideas from happening? What can you and your organization do to shepherd ideas into action? This blog post summarizes some of the best ideas presented by Scott Belsky of Behance.com in his SXSW Interactive 2011 session.

NTEN: Change, a new quarterly journal for nonprofit leaders and staff, launched on March 18 by NTEN. NTEN: Change offers quarterly in-depth articles, news, and insights for the nonprofit leader about all facets of nonprofit technology. This blog post includes an interview with NTEN staff about why they launched the journal, what readers can expect, and who should read it.

If you are looking to hire a consultant, or an employee, you don't want an Expert. You want an Experimenter. Don't hire an authority, hire a sharp experimenter who can apply theory in both innovative and practical ways to move the goals of your organization forward. This article talks about the pitfalls of hiring an "expert," and why you want an "experimenter" instead.

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.

Developing social media in a vacuum is unnecessary. Why not develop a social media support team? Using personal contacts and social networks, one can easily develop a great team to help you develop and improve upon social media concepts.

In social media, missing steps lead to frustration with using social media and sometimes complete disbelief in its use or good for the organization. More often than not, if the strategy isn't working, there are missing steps. This blog post includes four slides that outline steps to creating a comprehensive, goal-oriented social media presence and strategy.

Mark Horvath interviews Beth Kanter on social media time management, crowd sourcing, influence and fundraising.

How do you explain social media to the public, no matter what their level of understanding? This was the issue we faced crafting an "overview" of social media. From this experience, I offer five basic ideas that you have to utilize in order to convey the concept of social media effectively.

Do bureaucratic organizations stifle effective social media? Not necessarily! There are plenty of international, highly bureaucratic companies that use social media beautifully! It's not the amount of rule-following that prevents effective use of social media, but fear of change. In this post, I offer suggestions for approaching your bureaucratic organization to help them overcome their fear of change.