What is your organization's primary topic of conversation online? If you don't know the answer to that, you may find that is the crux of the issue with your online strategy. Without knowing and owning the online conversation topic, your organization is doomed to wander aimlessly about in the online desert. To get at this, I often ask this simple question: "What about your industry or issue is so interesting that you want to have a conversation about it?" Taking this simple question a step further, I'll often ask: what topic of conversation is interesting to potential fans, can define your organization, but isn't about the organization itself? Knowing your conversation, then owning it, offers a map through the online desert to real engagement, trust-building, and advocacy. This post includes three examples of nonprofits who really know what their conversations are about, and execute them superbly.

It's hard to know where to spend most of our limited time with social media. It's worthwhile to dive deep enough to consider the gateway questions that will help you make the decision to dive deeper or not.

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.

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.

Highlights and best practices of several youth entrepreneurship organizations using social media to promote youth entrepreneurship, source new borrowers from their loan fund, and support and find mentor businesses. This is part of a presentation offered at the Youth Business International Global Forum 2011 in Mexico City, Mexico.

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.

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.

Hebrew University and social media one year later: lessons learned, the challenges of working within an established institution, the importance of social media cheerleaders, and what has succeeded.

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.

Clarity of vision and objectives are the cornerstones of a strong social media strategy. In this post, I write about two different kinds of objectives: the organization's general objectives, and the value a social media strategy would provide to your organization. Once you've defined these, you can create your winning social media strategy!