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.

What are the essential online listening tools you need? In this post, I discuss the six essential FREE tools that also offer email alert features. However, the other secret is listening through RSS feeds. Find out how and why you want to each of these listening tools.

Reputation management is not just a tool for defensive online listening, but to alert us when good things are said about our company online. Two days ago, I found out that I won an industry award solely because my company was mentioned and hyperlinked from another site. How did I find out? A Google Alert I had set up notified me. In this post, I discuss the importance of effective listening posts, using my award as an example of "the flip side of reputation management."

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.