I LOVE your quote: “…but it strikes me that if that’s the only worry, then perhaps what you have is a staff issue and not a social media issue.”

Great point!

I thought it was very insightful and timely of you to make the request of IT departments to lengthen the “Internet leash.”

While it’s understandable from a management perspective to not want your staff spending all day Tweeting and making FaceBook comments, just as you wouldn’t want them texting or emailing their friends and family either, but it strikes me that if that’s the only worry, then perhaps what you have is a staff issue and not a social media issue.

Perhaps a happy medium would be to loosen the leash with some designated staff members who can become the online voices and faces of the organization.

The fact remains that more and more of the entire nonprofit world, both donors and organizations, are strengthening their social media relationships every day.

If yours in an organization that’s not yet using social media, then you’re being left out of a very important conversation. And who knows, they may even already be talking about you!

One of the biggest values of Twitter for me is the recommendations people make about tools like UStream.

Roger, I agree with Jay. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. For instance, I automate my blog posts because they are usually written on Sunday nights. But my core audience reads them at work, so I set it up to have a better chance of being read. And it works. My open rates on the email and read rates on the website are high.

Also, the automated things can help free the nonprofits up to be more personal. They can schedule the necessary tweets about an event, just like they’d schedule ads in a newspaper.

I do not understand your absolute clarity about what the “goal” should be. Why should the goal be building quality relationships? Why can’t individuals have their own goals for web tools?

I

The goal should be focused on building quality relationships rather than a large number of mostly unresponsive followers.

I think you are on the money…I was curious about what you were finding because of the volume of people following you. I am learning a lot just from the community that is twitter, facebook, linkedin. For example I learned about UStream because of twitter…Thursday night in Toronto we had 220 people in a room and 380 on line watchin the event live from around the world. I there is a cost not to be playing in the social media world. I am getting speaking gigs because of the media as well. I look forward to sharing ideas as we all learn. All the best and keep in touch j