The National Wildlife Federation uses free online listening tools to compile a powerful listening dashboard and stay on top of trends, mentions, and fan activity. This blog post summarizes the key points from their presentation at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference session.

The Listening workshop at the Nonprofit Technology Conference covered more than the tools: it was a point of view about why listening is critical to any organization. Wendy Harman discussed how the American Red Cross thinks about listening: it is critical to the relevancy of the organization, internal development, professional development, and reputation management.

There are plenty of other business functions besides sales and marketing that benefit from social media integration: human resources, internal communication, product development, training, customer service. I recently gave a presentation that talks about the ROI of integrating social media with these business functions. The slide show is embedded. Looking forward to your thoughts and contributions.

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.

The NTEN National Technology Conference 2009 Session on Mapping Social Media to Metric offered to opportunity to lean how nonprofit organizations are listening, utilizing social media, measuring their efforts and adapting their efforts based on what they are learning. In this post, I captured the session's conversations and lessons learned from the social media practitioners in the field.