Our social media experiences often boils down to one question: Do you want engagement? On Twitter, it’s going to require a two-way relationship, with communication that addresses questions and comments from your followers. Guest post author Susan Perri sees a lot of self-promotion and lack of common courtesy lately on Twitter. She offers examples of tweeps using Twitter expertly for real engagement, and three simple rules for using Twitter well. Ultimately, it’s quality, not quantity, and the same rules from your childhood playground still apply. Make friends, be nice, take turns, say please and thank you. Oh, yes, and have fun while you’re at it.

Follow the Leader is the second of three interactive service challenges sponsored by the Points of Light Institute to inspire people to become involved in community service. FTL integrates social media and game dynamics to move people to make commitments to service. In this interview with Michael Nealis, Interactive Strategy Coordinator for HandsOn Network, he outlines the goals, social media elements, and potential learnings from this unique social media activism campaign.

NP Tech, the Israeli organization designed to make technology more accessible to social organizations in Israel, recently launched GuideStar Israel. In this interview, Royi Biller, CEO of NP Tech, talks about the technology needs of Israeli nonprofit organizations, why it is important to have a GuideStar Israel, and the launch of TechSoup Global in late 2010.

The challenge: Help Oceana unlock the potential of its 10,000 Facebook Fans. John Haydon explains how his company, Inbound Zombie, helped Oceana acquire 5,000 new email addresses and 4,277 new Facebook Page connections during a 60-day campaign.

In early 2009, TuDiabetes.org, a social network for people touched by diabetes, asked members to share their diabetes poems as part of a contest called No-Sugar Added Poetry. The end result was the No-Sugar Added Poetry book. Manny Hernandez writes of the many lessons learned from crowdsourcing, publishing, and selling a community book.

Florence Broder, Social Media Manager for the Jewish Agency for Israel, writes about how the Jewish Agency uses social media, especially Twitter, to successfully and meaningfully connect with stakeholders online.

Estrella Rosenberg, founder of Big Love Little Hearts, came up with the idea for the #100x100 Foursquare campaign nine days before the launch. This is the story of how she promoted awareness of CHD through Foursquare, leveraged $25,000 in the meantime, and laid the groundwork for lasting legislative change.

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.

Social media takes so much time! Why does it always seem to take us away from work tasks, or so hard to manage effectively. Hannah Katzman offers her thoughts on how to stay in control, and why it's so difficult to manage social media in this guest post.

What happens when your cause is "brandjacked?" When you find out that a for-profit, unaffilitated entity is trying to make money off of your donors? That's exactly what happened to Trees for Troops in mid-November. Guest blogger Steve Drake, of Trees for Troops, tells how Trees for Troops fought back, lessons learned and the ROI of social media.