One of the hardest things to do is to develop a community of interested readers, sharers, and contributors to a blog. Creating a blog community takes time and commitment. A blog community is a community of readers who regularly comment and share your blog. This community can be fiercely loyal, if truly engaged with your blog and once engaged, this community can be moved to action. This post highlights 12 steps your organization can take to develop a community of fiercely loyal blog readers.

There are plenty of fundraising solutions that leverage social media, relying on fundraisers to tweet, share, and post their fundraising pages to their social networks. There are also fundraising solutions that fully rely on and live within a social platform, such as a Facebook fundraising application or a fundraising widget you place on your blog. Then there is the newest evolution: fundraising that innately utilizes the social media platform. I think THIS is social media fundraising, and it has just arrived. In the slide presentation, I review these three categories of social media fundraising and my thoughts about how social media fundraising has finally "arrived."

Without engagement, social media ultimately fails. However, you can design your social media activities to create online engagement, which is the focus on my presentation. The conference presentation covered five core concepts about how to design real online engagement for the highest return on engagement: numbers do not equal return on engagement, you can design social media activities for real engagement, how to leverage relationship ties organizationally to convert fans to superfans (and increase ROE), aligning SMART goals with engagement design, and three approaches to measuring ROE: community commitment, fan trust, and SMART goal achievement.

I had the pleasure of presenting on the topic of Ramping Up Your Facebook Engagement to a group of NYC nonprofit organizations last week. The presentation covered understanding Facebook post engagement, matching goals to engagement, practices for designing Facebook Page engagement, practical ideas for creating engagement on the Page based on recent research, and measuring engagement and ROE. During the presentation, I also heard about some great ways that nonprofit organizations are using Facebook successfully to engage and move people to action.

Linkedin has launched Linkedin Nonprofit Solutions under its Linkedin for Good brand, offering discounted products for nonprofits. Even better, the staff are asking good questions of the nonprofit community. I spoke with Bryan Breckenridge, who is heading up LInkedin Nonprofit Solutions and Connie Chan Wang of Linkedin for Good, about the new offerings for nonprofits, and where they see the program heading.

While Google Plus has been all the rage this week, one overlooked point is how the +1 button will change the way we search, interact with search results, and use the web in the future. With the arrival of the +1 button, what you "plus" on the web will ultimately affect what you will see within Google search, what all of your connections will see, and how the world may perceive you.

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.

There are five ways to best utilize Linkedin professionally: be goal-oriented, optimize both your personal and company profiles, utilize groups, and use Linkedin Answers. This blog post includes a slide deck with explanations about how to best use Linkedin.

The UNHCR faces a funding gap which has to be closed. To address that gap, and enable the UNHCR to continue providing, the USA for UNHCR launched the Blue Key Campaign, which is investing heavily in using social media to spread awareness about the #bluekey campaign.

NATAL, the leading trauma center for victims of terror and violence in Israel, created a highly successful Israeli blood donor awareness and registry campaign that successfully leveraged Facebook groups. This blog posts delves into why Facebook Groups worked well for this campaign.