By Matt
on August 19, 2010
Have you heard of Aspiration‘s Nonprofit Software Development Summit? It is THE place to connect with other people just like you who care about software and technology in the nonprofit sector. Let me emphasize that. Connect. With PEOPLE. This is not the place to sit down in a room and listen to a keynoter talk at you. No. We believe that the greatest resource and benefit that you can get from a conference like the Dev. Summit is the people who are around you. Users, abusers, developers, reverse-engineers and people who just want to know how to Drupal a Ruby’s rails with a CRM.
Our sessions are designed as discussions around a theme. There are no keynoters, just facilitators. This is a place to learn new things, meet cool (sometimes bizarre) people, get involved in great conversation and ultimately connect with what has become an incredible Aspiration family. I HIGHLY encourage you to at least sniff around the website if you are at all interested in connecting with others concerned with software and tech for the nonprofit and social justice sector.
The dates have been announced for this year (November 15-17) and we want to hear from you about what sessions you’d like to see! Let us know by leaving a comment on this post, Aspiration’s Facebook wall, tweeting at us or emailing info@aspirationtech.org.
To give you a better idea about what it’s like, check out the photos below:
It’s such a blast. Don’t miss out. More info about registration will be up soon! 
By Matt
on August 12, 2010
Our favorite dashboarding tool Netvibes has put together a Dashboarding Guide that inventories Monitoring and Analytics tools available to track your presence online (similar to putting together a Social Source Commons Toolbox).
It’s nice to have a document describing these tools while explaining their individual integration options with Netvibes. Tools are categorized by “Monitoring”, “Listening” and “Analyzing.” However, in my opinion, it’s hard to find practical differences between the “Monitoring” and “Listening” tools. What does a “monitoring” tool do different than a “listening” tool, I ask you? Regardless, each category takes you to a list of tools and while there isn’t much of a guided walk-through, the breadth of the tools covered is impressive. Each tool page has information about the tool as well as a place to leave comments and ratings similar to SSC Tool Comments (*cough* plug *cough*).
Overall, it’s great that Netvibes is putting this list together as more and more monitoring tools start coming out of the woodwork and as it becomes even easier to put together a comprehensive Social Media Dashboard. I wish there was more of a guide to how to use the “Guide” as when I first heard about it, I thought it was going to be more of a walk-through about using these tools effectively in your dashboard. Also, more filter options and designations for tools that require outside accounts (as in outside of the widget you add to your dashboard) would be much appreciated.
That being said, Netvibes has told us that this is just the first iteration so hopefully this Dashboarding Guide will mature into a great resource for those trying to navigate the world of social media tracking! So check out Netvibe’s Dashboarding Guide and let me know what YOU think!
By Matt
on August 10, 2010
In a pretty embarrassing snafoo (snafu?), our Desert Island Tool Email Blast, sent through Vertical Response, addressed many of our members as “NULL” rather than “Friend.”
This, of course, is a fail for mail merge, or when information from an address book (in our case, SSC users’ first names) is taken and automatically placed into the email. Most mail merge-ers give you an option for when a person’s record doesn’t have the requested information. So, for example, if Jimmy Potter didn’t provide his first name on his Social Source Commons account, mail merge gives us an option to provide another word to put in its place. I chose “Friend.” However, it looks like somewhere in the magic tubes of mystery and voodoo (otherwise known as computers and the internet), this broke down so that if a user did not supply a first name, instead of “Friend”, their first name was replaced with “NULL.”
As one of our users put it, it’s “Not so friendly to address your subscribers with ‘Null’…” (with all due respect to those actually named “NULL”). So if you are one of the unfortunate souls to have received a message to “NULL” rather than your (I’m sure) beautiful and lovely first name, we whole-heartedly and sincerely apologize. My bad.
Also? I now hate all online communications.
…kidding…
Matt
By Matt
on July 28, 2010
Recently, Allyson Kapin of FrogLoop posted a blog post on social media contests: Online Fundraising Contests: Effective or Digital Litter. I thought this was pretty intriguing because it brought up the question of what is valid content in social media, anyway?
“Litter”, as I imagine it in the social media sense, is a category of content types (tweets, blog posts, updates, etc.) that one ignores as something that is annoying or of no value to whoever is reading it. Disposable. However, some social media sites like Twitter find value in disposability. “Tweets” are limited to 140 characters and rather than the actual post being that which you care about, they usually announce something that you then research further or they redirect you themselves with a shortened URL.
If you agree with my thought that tweets are disposable, then where does the valid/litter distinction come in? Could all tweets be considered “litter” in the social media sense? Is it more “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” situation where “litter” is in the eye of the beholder? Or is there more of a black and white situation that nonprofits or organizations can live by to ensure their social media efforts are not litter similar to the belief that everyone thinks that telephone marketers are from the devil?
What do you think? What about other social media sites? How is their “litter” different?
