Whew, it's been a heck of a month for the nonprofity tech folks in the world: SXSW Interactive, followed by the Nonprofit Technology Conference. I attended both conferences, and paid a lot of attention to trends, commonalities, and differences that I saw between the two conferences. In this blog post, I list three commonalities and two major differences.

What is a social website? This blog post includes the slide presentation presented at the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference. The blog post and presentation reviews the goals of social media integration, technical categories of integration, examples from nonprofit websites, and additional resources.

Online community members with a lot of social influence within a community may be preventing full community participation. While groups welcome so-called "social media rock stars," these influencers can also weaken a group. The job of the community manager is to nurture full participation and ensure that the social media rock stars don't adversely affect community participation.

Facebook plugins (including the Like button) and social sharing tools amplify your content on the web and on Facebook. This post includes a slide presentation that comprehensively explains the different Facebook plugins, understanding the Open Graph, Facebook NFO (EdgeRank), the ROI of a Facebook Like as a case study, the ROI of social sharing as a case study, and primary social sharing tools.

Though it may seem impossible to create a personal relationship with a family of bears, the North American Bear Center has enabled that beautifully through Facebook. All told, Lily the Bear's fans have helped to raise $159,597 from 23,502 fans just this year. In terms of social network fundraising, that's huge. The real question is why. In this blog post, we'll examine what the NABC has done so well that could be replicable by others.

Stop trying to measure sentiment. Measuring the change in online sentiment is the wrong ROI to measure. Instead, measure online engagement, and worry about your lack of engagement.

Share The State of the Blogosphere offers a useful spotlight on important trends and returns from blogging – many of which can be applied to the nonprofit sector. If you cross the results of the SOTB with the recent Idealware social media guide research and survey about how nonprofits use social media, the result is [...]

The single most frequent question that I get from nonprofit organizations who want to use Twitter is "how do I get started?" My response is to follow The Twitter Rule: Less Broadcasting, More Conversation. The embedded slide deck includes strategies for using Twitter to create social capital and conversations.

The voting is open for this year's Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) workshops. The NTC is a not-to-miss conference for nonprofit organizations. You can't afford to NOT think about how your organization can take advantage of social media, video, online fundraising, hardware and software, and trends in technology. Included in this post is a summary of five sessions that I hope you'll consider.

Now that your Place is claimed, what are the capabilities of Places and its potential uses? Most importantly, how does that functionality open up possibilities? This post explores six ways that Places offers opportunities for you to interact on Places with your fans - and brainstorms a few possibilities.