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.

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.

Social media is ALL about engagement. However, it's not so easy to create engagement. A comprehensive social media strategy should include an engagement strategy on every platform that adds value to your fans and creates deeper loyalty. This blog post summarizes the essential elements to designing an engagement strategy on each social media channel, and a slideshow to illustrate the main concepts.

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.

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!

How does social media fit into the overall messaging? What role does it play in the sales cycle? This post considers the value of social media in meeting organizational goals, conceptualized as a flow chart of the overall brand and program marketing strategy.

An interesting survey by Harris Poll shows that Engaged Americans (those who have volunteered, donated or advocated in the past year) want to be more involved in their nonprofit causes through social media. The survey also shows that they are already taking action as a result of social media engagement. How can nonprofits take advantage of this information?

Social Media tips from Affilicon Israel 2009.

The ONE Sermon Campaign has all the elements of a successful social media campaign: easy to participate, continued offline and online engagement, potentially viral. This post explores why the ONE Sermon Campaign is a great model for nonprofit social media campaigns.