Today is International Women's Day. There are numerous actions around the world that in which you can participate, and I encourage you to do so. In honor of International Women's Day, here are some of the organizations, online campaigns, and ideas focused on empowering women and girls that continue to inspire me.

Images are signal through noise, and almost 60% of nonprofit organizations surveyed intend to use more social media images in 2015 than in prior years. To catch up with the rise in digital image sharing, a field has sprung up known as "visual listening." Visual listening is the practice of monitoring and tracking specific images online, and a new tool called Ditto purports to do just that. Social media monitoring as we know it is about to expand from text-focused monitoring to image and video "listening" in the next few years. This blog post explores the potential of visual listening, one tool available now to try, and why this is the next big thing in social media management.

On Tuesday, I offered a workshop at the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network’s annual conference on Digital Storytelling Tools, subtitled “The One and Only Storytelling/Digital Tools/Speed Dating Mashup.” The workshop had four goals: leave with a solid “small moment story” idea, have an idea of how to use stories to reach organizational goals, develop at least two […]

I'm a big fan of using the mind mapping technique to map out a social media strategy, but until three weeks ago, I hadn't considered using it for other applications. In this blog post, I offer examples of mind maps I've developed and how I approach mind mapping. The post includes testimonials, links and articles about the more popular mapping software applications, as well as further readings and resources for developing your own mind maps. Read on!

Idealware has just released its latest report, "Exploring Cutting Edge Social Media," which explores the questions "when should you use new social media tools and channels, why, and for what use." That's quite a tall order to fill, really. The best parts of the report deal with why an organization should use "cutting edge" social media, determining the best time in the lifecycle of a social media channel to try it out, and descriptions of some of the newest sites. In this blog post, I review the report and offer an overview of Idealware's detailed analysis of new and developing social media tools.