social media

It's no secret that Millennials enjoy participating in the creation of programs, fundraisers, campaigns and products and want the opportunity to personalize their experience whenever possible. Innovations made possible by emerging technology have fueled the demand for creative ways to get involved - we're designing our own shoes, water bottles and advocacy campaigns, rather than waiting for an institution to tell us what our options for participation are. Empowering Millennials to support a cause or product their way has been a proven way to engage our generation, and nonprofits and businesses alike continue to experiment with new ways to give us individual options. Here are just a few of the most recent examples:

"Make It Your Own" Burgers
This week marks the grand opening of 4food, a fast food restaurant that says "meals are necessarily social events," and means it. Customers can order online, on an iPad in the restaurant, and will soon be able to do so via their mobile phones. The menu board changes based on what's most popular at the time and what ingredients are most available at that location. But 4food is not just a tech-savvy restaurant with a social media presence. Not only do they have community groups, a blog and active profiles on Facebook, Twitter and foursquare, 4food encourages and enables its burger-loving customers to become salesmen as well.

You can create your own burger, name it, and it will be saved in the system for future visits. Not only is that convenient for people who are likely to forget which of the dozens of tasty combinations they had last time, but it also gives them the opportunity to market their personalized sandwiches to their friends. Each time someone orders the creation by name, you earn a royalty of 25 cents, which is credited to your online account.

"Make It Your Own" Music
Watching music videos might be so early 90s, but music video director Chris Milk, along with the folks at Google and the band Arcade Fire, are trying to make it interesting again with music that takes you home again. No really, it takes you to your home. The new video for "We Used to Wait," from the band's new album allows individuals to personalize the video by entering their address. Google satellite images take you on a jog through your neighborhood and to your house and even let you send a note to your childhood self. It's the perfect thing to indulge a homesick student...and to introduce them to both Google Chrome and Arcade Fire's new album.

"Make It Your Own" Fundraising
Endorse for a Cause, which launched last week, is an example of one socially conscious application of our love for personalization. While there have been many experiments around giving back at the cash register, whether it's online or offline, In addition to similar donate-while-you-shop models, Endorse for a Cause takes these experiments a step further by tapping individuals to market items for stores like Target and Starbucks and rewarding them by kicking money from affiliate fees to their cause when a friend purchases the product. For now, there are a limited number of nonprofits that can receive funds from Endorse for a Cause, but the individual-friendly platform allows users to nominate additional nonprofits for participation.

If someone is too shy to ask their social media friends for money directly, they can play the slacktivist card and post something already popular like a Starbucks card or a pair of Old Navy espadrilles to their Facebook and Twitter profiles through Endorse for a Cause. Hopefully their friends will be tempted to click through, buy the product and thereby earn a donation for their cause. While some might criticize this concept as another enabling platform that leads people to satisfy their desire (or duty) to help out by clicking a few buttons, which excuses them from doing things that are actually helpful to their cause - or doing as much as they might have if this platform didn't exist.

At the end of the day, success for burger joints, bands, fundraising tools and other products will be based on their quality - not just their inclusion of user-generated and user-personalized content. But these innovative ways to involve individuals in the creation and marketing of products can draw in new users and loyal supporters for products and organizations with staying power. Read more »

If you're reading this blog, you're probably drinking the social media kool-aid. You recognize the value of social media not only from a personal perspective but as a critical tool for your organization to reach new audiences, communicate more seamlessly with its constituents, raise money, and market products or services.  You may have spent months growing comfortable with the tools, building your online presence and that of your organization. You've explained what 2.0 means to the organization's leadership. You've helped move them to it...and then past it. You're one of the primary social networkers on the staff. It's great for your organization. It's great for your career. There's only one problem. A recent study showed that the average 26-year-old has changed jobs seven times in the last eight years. Especially if you're a Millennial, odds are that you're eyeing a jump to a different job, issue area or sector, or you will be soon. Have you thought about how you will approach the challenge of transitioning your social media identities?

I was recently chatting with a friend - let's call her Sarah - who had no idea what to do with her Twitter account. As a communications professional at a nonprofit organization fighting human trafficking, she's spent more than a year connecting with hundreds of people who also work on human trafficking. She's used social media to build the brand of her organization, foster discussion and distribute resources. Now she's transitioning to a new job that explores another of her interests - cooking. While she still cares about human trafficking, she won't have the time and energy to immerse herself in reading, writing and, yes, tweeting about the issue. Instead she will probably want to leverage her social media skills, and her account, for her new job.

But this could be a significant loss for her organization, which, at least in part, helped her to build her presence online. After all, they paid for the hours she invested in social media as a part of their overall strategy, and the organization's brand recognition offline probably lent her immediate credibility with new contacts online. On the other hand, without Sarah's initiative, skills and personality, her social media accounts, and those of the organization, might never have gotten off the ground. Now that their donors and partners are accustomed to engaging not only with the organization's official Twitter stream, but also Sarah's individual account, it might be difficult to transfer that relationship and interest to a new staff member.

This also creates a personal and relational dilemma for Sarah. She wouldn't go on attending human trafficking conferences or accepting speaking engagements on human trafficking issues, but her Twitter feed isn't so simple. Should she unfollow most of her human trafficking friends to make room for her new cooking friends? Should she start an entirely new account focusing on her new endeavor and build from scratch? Or should she make some Twitter announcements about her plans to switch to a new primary topic and let the chips fall where they may? Should the human trafficking organization have any say in how she talks about their break up?

With people of all generations increasingly and necessarily blending their personal and professional lives on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, we may be faced with many more tricky questions about how to move on. Have you made a major transition with your social media account? How can we make it smoother for ourselves, our followers and our organizations? Read more »

One of the most common pieces of advice given to young people is "get a mentor," but for some that's easier said than done. There are a few people in my life that I would consider mentors, and almost all of them have been people I just kind of lucked into relationships with but whose input and support has been invaluable. Keenly aware that I'm not an expert on the subject, I chatted with nonprofit management consultant Adin Miller, who showed his passion for the importance of mentoring when I was compiling tips for young change-makers and idealists. This post is a summary of our conclusions.


Shop for a mentor

Mentor relationships can help us supplement some of the life experiences or knowledge that we lack. So when trying to recognize a mentor in your life, it can be helpful to ask yourself what experiences are you missing or what experiences can someone else help guide you through. When you're new in the working world, there are times when that seems like the answer is "everything," but if you think about it, your most pressing work challenges will probably come to you. Having a good mentoring relationship is not like having a magic eight ball or as Adin put it "they aren't answer givers." Instead good mentors should help you frame an issue, look at your options and then step back and let you make the decision.



Some of the most natural mentors can be people you work with because they understand your sector and your organization and probably have some sense of your goals, strengths and weaknesses already. Since this has the potential of creating a little awkwardness, Adin suggests that seeking out someone you no longer work for or people within your organization that you don't report to directly can give you the best of both worlds. People that you connect with over shared interests online can develop into valuable mentors as well. For example, I've never met Adin in person, but he's already taught me a lot about mentoring through our conversation about this post, which started when he replied to my tweet asking for advice for young idealists. Especially among the nonprofit social media community, I've found people are shockingly willing to engage in discussion, debate and, well, mentoring, with people they have only met online.



The surprise mentor

Sometimes mentors come from unexpected relationships. Because so many mentors develop organically, it's worth your while to make an effort to get to know the people in your professional network. As you get to know them, you might be surprised by the life experiences they've had that are applicable to your life. Even if you weren't looking for a mentor's advice in a particular situation, you could find advice you didn't know you needed from people you interact with every week. 


Recognize the moment

Since many successful mentoring relationships emerge organically from existing professional and personal relationships - whether they be in the office, online or from a distance - you have to be ready to see and latch onto would-be mentors when they present themselves. By the same turn, when you see that a colleague or acquaintance has questions on a subject that's familiar to you, encourage them to consider you a mentor on the subject, come back to you with more questions or have coffee just to discuss their interest in it.



It goes both ways

As many things as Boomers and Gen Xers have to share with younger members of the workforce, Millennials have something to give in return. And no, I'm not just talking about being good with Facebook and Twitter. Especially with all of the interest in our generation lately, we can be of value in helping other generations understand how to engage our peers. We can offer unique perspectives on contemporary communication - not just the technical "how to’s" but the thinking behind it. We may have the best grasp on the privacy controversy, or understand what it means to be a student today, and we've seen what works and what doesn't work with our peers. 



Think about the skills and experiences each of us has with a certain sport, hobby, culture, or language --ones that are completely independent of our generation, but that nonetheless might be helpful to someone older and more experienced but who lacks those specific experiences. Allison Jones and Allison Fine have both written blog posts recently that discuss reverse mentoring and what is necessary to move it beyond a cute idea to a strategy that works for organizations.



Keep your mentor relationship from dying

We're all busy. And it seems that we are just going to keep getting busier, so mentoring can easily fall apart if we don't actively encourage it along. Whether you're a mentor or a mentee, the answer is simple. Follow up, follow up, follow up. Thank you notes are nice, but substantive follow up is better. If your last meeting focused on a dilemma or a decision you had to make, make sure you let your mentor know what the outcome was. If you have additional questions after the meeting, reach back out with those. Schedule another chat in advance, just to check in. 



Adin stressed that exchanges with mentors should not feel purely transactional. You aren't just getting information from them and moving on. It's a relationship, and even if the person is a professional connection, you should form an emotional bond. And he added, in the absence of follow up, it will make it difficult for your mentor to know how to respond when you want to talk through your next challenge with them because they've been out of the loop for a while.



What do you think makes a good mentor relationship? Have you found any mentors through social media? Read more »

A study released earlier this summer out of the University of Michigan, shows college students today have 40 percent less empathy compared to college students 20 to 30 years ago. Here we go again – broad assertions that Generation Y or the Millennials are less empathetic and more self centered than generations before us.  According to Sara Konrath, one of the study’s researchers, “Many people see the current group of college students—as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident, and individualistic in recent history.” We could sit and challenge some of these stark generalizations – let’s face it, 20-30 years ago it was the 1980’s – not exactly the most altruistic decade, but I digress.

Today’s Millennials are volunteering at rates higher than generations before them.  They are joining together on land and online to raise money and awareness for causes they care about – from the earthquake in Haiti or the floods in Nashville to name a few recent examples.  They are at the forefront of developing new innovations that are solving some of our worlds toughest social problems, like the fellows I recently came across through the Unreasonable Institute. And, let’s not forget, some of the defining events of our young lives that have forever changed who we are (and I’d argue made us more empathetic) – Columbine, Oklahoma City, September 11, and Hurricane Katrina amongst others.  But rather than look at these life changing events that brought us closer together as a country and as a generation – the study suggests several factors that are behind the apparent reduction in empathy – in particular, increased exposure to violent media content, and of course, the overall use of social media.

Blaming social media somehow presumes that online relationships don’t require empathy, patience, or deep connectedness – and while it may be easier to have so-called ‘friends’ online, including those whom you never met or rarely talk to in real life, this presupposes that online relationships don’t take care and feeding. “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline,” Science Daily quoted U-M graduate student Edward O’Brien, who along with U-M researcher Sara Konrath and undergraduate student Courtney Hsing conducted the analysis, combining the results of 72 studies of American college students conducted between 1979 and 2009.  In my world, much of which is lived online – ‘virtual’ friends certainly don’t replace the need for real tried and true friendships.

If you want to truly establish a connection with another person, empathy is essential.  I guess the question for researchers (and for us) is, are we able to move beyond showing our compassion to others through the click of a button? On the one hand, there is something convenient about clicking a button that brings us into contact with a person (and this is certainly not limited to Gen Y). But on the other hand, perhaps the ease and convenience has disconnected us from the process of relationship making. Has all of this technology actually disconnected us from the process of getting to know one another, sharing life’s little secrets, and replaced it with measuring number of followers or retweets?

We should constantly be refining our skills to ensure our ability to remain empathetic – and I would love to find ways that social media can actually help enhance this. Are there new processes via technology whereby empathy can actually be developed or enhanced? Is this really just a “problem with kids today” or is this lack of empathy something that older generations -- especially those who live and work in the new social media culture are likely to be experiencing as well. Sometimes we are so caught up in blaming the kids and their technology, that we fail to notice the larger societal trends.

What do you think, is empathy on the decline – and is social media to blame? Read more »

From what I can tell, the level of caution about how much personal information we share online seems to be roughly correlated with the number of candles on our cakes. Forgive the generalizations, but most Millennials are largely unconcerned with censoring the personal information they put online - often to the point of oversharing - because they assume most of it will be forgotten, and who really cares anyway? Most Gen Xers and Boomers, on the other hand, are wringing their hands and shaking their heads over the school admissions decisions and employment opportunities that are being lost every day as Millennials seem to post every controversial opinion, irresponsible photo and awkward relationship drama they can come up with. And don’t even get my mom started on identity theft.

While many in this latter group thought (or hoped) this social network sharing was just a phase, technology experts now predict that getting older will not discourage Millennials from continuing to share information online. The experts once thought our nearly constant use of Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms was a passing fad, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that 895 technology experts surveyed by Pew Research Center and Elon University say it’s here to stay.

It seems likely that instead of abandoning our online tools, Millennials’ use of social media will continue to mature with us. We’ll increasingly use our presence on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to build (rather than undermine) our careers and social circles. As for that the fear that an employer or colleague might see an embarrassing twitpic, an incriminating wall post or something else overly personal - it will likely fade as everyone gradually (probably some generations more gradually than others) realizes no one is immune to embarrassing moments online, and it’s not the type of thing that will make and break careers.

But what would a debate be without a dissenting opinion? While a smaller contingent than a few years ago, still nearly 30 percent of Pew’s experts warn that the consequences of our online oversharing (which one called an upcoming “social media hangover”), along with other interests and demands on our time, will lead Millennials to pull back much of our online personalities. At the same time, Mitch Joel suggests on his blog that people are already gravitating in significant numbers toward tools that allow them to keep their anonymity, like Chatroulette, Formspring and Second Life. These tools still provide connection and person-to-person interaction, but give users the added comfort of being anonymous, if they want it, and that, Joel says, encourages content you won’t find on less anonymous platforms.

This potential trend toward sharing less about who we really are online is in many ways reminiscent of how many first started interacting online, in AOL chat rooms. We talked to strangers online about sports, relationships, politics and other shared interests, but the cardinal rule was to keep your real name, where you live and other personal information private. Newer waves of online interaction pushed us to trade in screen names like luvsdogs21 for our real identities, and now we may have reached a point of peak transparency and authenticity. If the dissenting experts are right and people continue to revert back to more anonymous social sites in greater numbers, will we see an emerging cycle of anonymity and oversharing online?

The opinion is still split over what the consequences of putting our identities online will be, but I have to agree with the majority on this one. I respect people’s need for anonymity and I’ll admit I’ve learned some things about a few of my Facebook and Twitter friends that I wish I hadn’t, but generally I’m still resistant to the call for anonymity and limited sharing online. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If we’re not willing to connect with people we don’t already know in real life and we’re not willing to express our opinion (and claim it) and we’re not willing to share some of the little bits and quirks that make us human, then we’re missing a lot of what social networking has to offer. Building the connections and trust that leads to collaboration, partnership, favors, employment, and other opportunities requires us to give up anonymity and own who we are online and offline.

Where do you think we're headed with anonymity and oversharing online? Read more »

There’s no question social media has given rise to a number of things we couldn’t have imagined just a few short years ago.  One of the more interesting things we’ve witnessed is the changing dynamics of individuals as “influencers” based on superficial metrics like how many Twitter followers or Facebook friends one has. Businesses and organizations have always strived to have a positive influence, but when we look at the role that social media has played in breaking down barriers and catapulting individuals into “influencers” the waters become a little murkier.  After all, what is influence?  

To me, influence is not about the number of retweets or votes in a contest, it’s about following and engaging with people whom I genuinely respect for their opinions and outlooks on topics that I care about.  This is the kind of engagement that has opened me up to new friends, new possibilities and exposed me to new ideas – none of which are things that I believe can be measured with metrics or algorithms.  That’s why, as I was peeling back the onion on Fast Company’s new Influence Project, I was surprised with what I saw.  

Truth be told, Fast Company is my favorite magazine and is the only magazine I still subscribe to and receive in the mail.  When I read about an experiment they were going to do a couple of issues back with the viral marketing company Mekanism, I was intrigued.  But in watching the execution of the campaign over the course of the past week, it has completely missed the mark. Fast Company set out to turn their readers into marketing machines using their personal influence to get their friends to click, register, and boast their own influence.  Think of it as an online yearbook where the cheerleaders and prom king and queen have the largest pictures, based solely on their popularity.

Here’s how it works: users interested in providing their data to the project can sign up in about a minute and are given a unique URL to Tweet, Facebook, blog, etc. Every time their unique URL is clicked, their influence goes up – the concept is pretty simple. But, the scale of your influence, and therefore the size of your photo, is based on two measures (as outlined below by Fast Company):

1. The number of people who directly click on your unique URL link. This is the primary measure of your influence, pure and simple.

2. You will receive partial “credit” for subsequent clicks generated by those who register as a result of your URL. In other words, anyone who comes to the site through your link and registers for their own account will be spreading your influence while they spread theirs. That way, you get some benefit from influencing people who are influential themselves. We will give a diminishing, fractional credit (1/2, ¼, 1/8 etc ) for clicks generated up to six degrees away from your original link.

Fast Company started this campaign with a simple question – who are the most influential people online right now?  But, online influencers and interested bystanders alike are asking, who cares?  Would you tweet your followers, email your friends and update your facebook status in order to be considered an influencer?  What could Fast Company do to turn this into less of a gimmick and more about why influence matters? Does online influence really matter?

Recent philanthropy news seems to have revealed a trend. Musicians, and Nashville residents, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill organized a benefit concert, which has raised about $2 million for Nashville flood relief. Artist Damien Hirst rallied 98 of his colleagues to produce an art auction that raised $38 million for the (RED) campaign's efforts to fight AIDS in Africa. Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis and New York Knicks player Tracy "T-Mac" McGrady are leaning on NBA players to raise funds to build schools for Darfuri refugee camps through the Darfur Dream Team.

It seems obvious to have artists paint, to have musicians sing and to have NBA players call on their teammates in support of a cause - but what your supporters have in common with these fundraising celebrities is that they too can and should be leveraged in a way that makes the most of their skills and network. Unfortunately, more often than not nonprofits fail to ask their partners to do what makes the most sense.

Unique Skills...
Instead of looking at the skills and extended networks their existing advocates have to offer, they ask lawyers to paint murals and they ask teachers to stuff envelopes. Yes, all of these activities may move the ball forward bit by bit. The nonprofit needs the mural painted and the envelopes stuffed, and the lawyer and the teacher may even have had fun working on those projects. But they aren't the most strategic asks that could be made of these supporters - people who could probably contribute much more value and have a more fulfilling volunteer experience if they were asked to do something more in line with their skill set and interests. The Taproot Foundation is great at matching volunteers' professional skills with projects that nonprofits badly need. While not every nonprofit is ready for a large-scale project like a Taproot grant, this principle can be applied to how they engage their networks every day.

And Unique Networks...
If there's not a task or project that matches the skills of the supporters you have, you can also be strategic about leveraging their networks in appropriate ways. While you might not have the star power available that some of these multi-million dollar campaigns tapped into, your supporters can be surprisingly influential in their networks - whether that be a sorority, a rec league softball team, a book club or a network of bloggers. Everyone has a group of people they can turn to and say (as Damien Hirst said to his artist friends) "If you do this for me, some day, when you need to call on me, I will reciprocate for you."

And That Goes for Social Media Too...
Now that nonprofits are convinced of the power of social media to fundraise and friend raise, we are going overboard at times by asking even social media resistant supporters to join certain platforms SO they can support us through those platforms. You don't need to bring all your supporters to Facebook so they can "like" your organization, join your cause and start receiving your Facebook messages. That would be like asking your supporters to become pastry chefs so you can have a great bake sale. It's a good idea for nonprofits to create a presence on social media because that's where many of their supporters already spend time and have access to a network, but it's an even better idea to be strategic about how they invest their time on social media.

While it's true that social citizens might be the perfect supporters to champion your cause online, Millennials (and other generations) have other creative ideas, talents and networks that shouldn't be overlooked or undervalued. For more tips on engaging Millennial volunteers, see Kari's recent post. At the end of the day, the real goal is to empower volunteers and supporters where they already have a presence and expertise, whether that's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or (gasp) not online at all.

Last week as Google unveiled its list of the world’s top 1,000 most-visited sites on the web, it was no surprise that Facebook topped that list. Even amid the privacy backlash the company has seen in recent weeks,  and the subsequent yet seemingly unsuccessful declaration of May 31 as “Quit Facebook Day” there’s something that keeps all of us -- 540 million unique visitors a month that is, or roughly 32 percent of the current online population -- coming back for more.

When looking through Google’s list, perhaps what could be seen as more of a surprise, (especially for those of us who live our lives at the intersection of technology and social change) is the fact that it takes quite a while to get to a site on the list that’s devoted exclusively to charity or social good. In fact, as Peter Panapento over at the Chronicle on Philanthropy pointed out it’s not until 854, that Causes.com appears as the first true “social good” site.  A special thank you to Peter for spending his lunch hour culling through the list to determine that one!

While this may not be encouraging news for nonprofits who are spending significant staff time and dollars perfecting their social media strategies, it does strengthen the case for meeting your donors, volunteers, or constituents where they are.  A case we’ve been trying to make for quite some time. But, before your boss gets too carried away asking how you’re going to position your organization to show up on Google’s next list it’s important to take a closer look at the sites who did make the cut, and how you can best leverage them.

Many of the top sites are resources that people use to find information about their friends, what’s happening in the news, or products they want to buy or sell - but most of those sites don’t produce all of their own content. Even better, they allow opportunities for nonprofits to give them content. As much as we aspire to, we might have to accept that most us with social good sites will never find ourselves on Google’s top 1,000 list.   Even so, it's up to each of us to make sure we take advantage of the opportunity to include information about our causes on some of the most visited sites on the web – be it Facebook, Wikipedia, blogspot or wordpress, flickr and youtube.  All nonprofits should take the necessary steps like perfecting  search engine optimization to make sure they are showing up on Yahoo, Microsoft, bing and other popular search engines.

With approximately 1.5 million nonprofit organizations in the United States alone - we already know that everyone is competing for the same pool of donors and volunteers, but now nonprofits are also competing for our clicks. So, how are you positioning your organization to emerge and stand out among them?

This weekend at Clinton Global Initiative University, I had the opportunity to hear from one of the great innovators in technology for good, Ushahidi founder Ory Okolloh. While it was interesting to hear Ory discuss the impetus behind the mobile mapping platform and the tension around providing platforms in alternate languages, it was another point that kept me thinking on the flight back from Miami.

There's been a lot of concern about slacktivists and how to move them to significant and meaningful action as well as general lament about straight-up slackers frivolously spending their time playing endless games of Farmville, taking inane quizzes and watching ridiculous videos. Ory says that there is a growing sentiment in Africa that youth are wasting too much time using technology for fun, time that could be better spent using the same technology for advocacy, human rights monitoring and development. But she says she doesn’t see that as a problem.

At first I paused, not sure I heard her correctly. She explained that she saw nothing wrong with people using social media "selfishly" because if they enjoyed it, they would become comfortable with it, and then they would be ready for action when the moment arises. When they see injustice, need to fight for their rights or the rights of others, or feel they aren't being represented by their government or media, they'll be ready. Considering it further, I realized this theory is really no different than what I sometimes tell nonprofits who question the fundraising results of social media - people might not be using it now to donate en masse, but if and when they do, the organizations who are already well-versed in the tools and have an active online presence will be the ones to benefit.

As people who see the potential of technology and social media to promote social change, human rights and economic development, I think it can be easy to get on our high horses and judge people who have no interest in twitter beyond talking about what they think of American Idol and what they ate for lunch. But to Ory's point, maybe it's ok for people to be agnostic online sometimes. After all, these tools were not built for social action or education. They are often built for entertainment and commercial purposes and only later leveraged by innovators who know them well when a time for social action arises.

Maybe we shouldn't be pushing every slacktivist or slacker to adopt a cause and use their online time more productively. Instead of rolling our eyes at kids these days and their online gaming and chatroulette, should we embrace the fact that youth all over the world are becoming well-versed in the tools that can champion a cause, keep leaders honest, and drive a revolution - when the time comes?

As with many new technologies and developments, social media is being used in surprising and unintended ways to analyze and reveal unexpected data and trends. Twitter, Facebook and Google tools have already been used for market research, sales predictions and targeted advertising. Twitter, for example, has shown remarkable accuracy at forecasting box office success, even more accuracy than the currently used (and comparably complex) Hollywood Stock Exchange method. Now credit card companies are reportedly using foursquare and other location sharing platforms to predict divorce, and therefore financial troubles, by analyzing the places people are checking in frequently - the logic being that Home Depot and Bed, Bath & Beyond check-ins demonstrate stability in a way that frequent late night bar check-ins do not.

While it seems a bit creepy to think about companies analyzing where we go and what we tweet about, you have to admit it's also pretty resourceful. As someone who thinks that nonprofits should often operate a lot more like for-profit companies, I wonder if there's an opportunity to use this strategy for good. What if nonprofits could use public data from social networking sites like Twitter and foursquare to predict which demographics and individuals are likely to be interested in their organization or cause?

The places people visit and the subjects they post about on social networks might provide clues about whether they are likely to donate or volunteer before they are asked - or even inform what type of appeal might work best. It might take extra work or expense up front, but it could save time and money in the long run by allowing development teams to concentrate their resources on the people who are most likely to respond. While each nonprofit might not have the capacity to pour over Twitter data, it could be an interesting third party business opportunity.

And once consumers are able to get used to the fact that people are checking up on their social media posts, this strategy could benefit them as well. Instead of sifting through all kinds of volunteer opportunities and donation asks from organizations that don't particularly inspire me, I wouldn't mind receiving targeted solicitations only from nonprofits that have some reason to believe I would be interested in getting involved in their work.

Is this social media research in the future of nonprofit development and recruitment? Is it an invasion of privacy or just smart? How would you respond if you knew you were being targeted by a nonprofit because of your tweets and check-ins?