The old way individuals thought about community — who they are and how they connect to likeminded people — was geographic. The neighborhood was the community, and people built community to physically be together, whether in their workplaces or churches. But today, people are centered more around electronic communities of interest. Things like online book clubs, professional networks like LinkedIn, and social networks are new ways to get a sense of self and community.
LONDON, July 16, 2009, Forbes.com — "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings," as the saying goes. But investment bank Morgan Stanley has taken the phrase to heart, after it published a report on teenage media consumption--penned by a fifteen year old.
So you have your Facebook page and your YouTube channel, and you’re even on Twitter. Now what? How do you get more people to visit your pages and, more importantly, how do you get those who have visited to keep coming back? Keeping your pages fresh with photos, videos, articles and links is a key factor in creating and sustaining online traffic.
Interactive agency MindComet has launched CommuniCause, a program that allows the public to vote for the organization that they'd like to receive pro bono social-media consulting services from the agency worth $25,000.
Laconia, NH, July 14, 2009 — Participation in social networks continues to grow at a frenetic pace in 2009. Facebook, at well over 300 million members is on track to triple in size this year, for example, and Twitter is growing more than five times faster than Facebook.
July 13, 2009, Hartford Business Journal — At the NBA draft in Madison Square Garden on June 25, Mike Soltys grasped his Blackberry and typed in live updates to his Twitter account, espnmikes.
Washington, July 6, 2009, The Christian Science Monitor — The video gave substance to what seemed so far away. We saw the look in her eyes as they went lifeless. We heard the sounds of her friends and family as they begged her to hold on. And she became the personification of the struggle for democracy in a country where voices for freedom are quelled.
Palo Alto, California, June 29, 2009 — The nation’s largest nonprofit organizations have outpaced corporations and academic institutions in their adoption of social media, for the second year in a row, according to a new research study, “Still Setting the Pace in Social Media: The First Longitudinal Study of Usage by the Largest US Charities.” The study was conducted by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Senior Fellow and Research Chair of the Society for New Communications Research and Chancellor Professor of Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite Inc., a Seattle-based research firm.
Orlando, FL, July 6, 2009 — More than 1,500 charities are vying for a chance to win CommuniCause, a nationwide online contest that awards one winner a social media makeover. Launched earlier this year by Orlando-based interactive agency Mindcomet, the CommuniCause campaign gives Americans the opportunity to vote online and rally support for their favorite 501c3 non-profit organizations. The winning organization receives $25,000 in consulting services from MindComet to help improve its social media presence and fundraising outreach efforts. The campaign concludes on July 31st.
July 5, 2009, The Washington Post — Twitter has been hailed as an incredibly useful marketing tool for businesses and brands, both big and small, to disseminate information and engage with consumers on a massive scale. But what about non-profits? The ability to use social media to fundraise for charitable purposes has been questionable. A few months ago, the Washington Post reported that Causes, one of Facebook's popular applications used by non-profits to raise money, was not netting much money for charities, despite its large amount of users (according to the application's page, it has 26 million monthly users).
