UnTweetable: Twitter as Borg

Twitter was launched in March 2006 (source: Wikipedia). Within two years, it had over 1,000,000 total users sending approximately 3,000,000 tweets per day (Source: source: TechCrunch).

Shockingly, over the past year, they have blown these numbers away. It is estimated that by the end of this month (April 2009), they will have over 420,000,000 unique visits per week (source: TechCrunch).

This is a mind-boggling speed of adaptation. The same source above estimates that the impact of Oprah's adoption alone brought 1,000,000 additional users to the site.

As I struggle to grasp the impact that Twitter will have on the communications efforts of nonprofit organizations, I draw back on my childhood understanding of rapid cultural sea change:

"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

Perhaps the attached photo-essay better explains my thoughts.

What do you think?

We Are Media: The Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits

I was recently introduced to the We Are Media: The Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits site, and thought you might be interested:
http://www.WeAreMedia.org/

The We Are Media Project is a community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world.
Curated by NTEN, the community will work in a networked way to help identify the best existing resources, people, and case studies that will give nonprofit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to be the media. The community will help identify and point to the best how-to guides and useful resources that cover all aspects of creating, aggregating, and distributing social media. The resulting curriculum which will live on this wiki and will also cover important organizational adoption issues, strategy, ROI analysis, as well as the tools.

Ultimately, we hope to build this wiki and community into the "go-to place" for vetted resources about social media strategies and tools for nonprofits and/or individuals who work for or with nonprofits and need practical advice about getting started or to quickly access best practices, examples, or experience from other practitioners working in nonprofits.

'Groundswell' Gains a Following - Advertising Age - Book Reviews

Here is an intereting article in Advertising Age about the aptly named book, "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies," which serves as a "guide to (often misguided) marketers about how to go about setting up a groundswell strategy, they offer up the acronym POST:

• People. Are your customers interacting with social technologies? Which ones? How do they use them?
  
• Objective. What does a company hope to accomplish with a groundswell strategy?
  
• Strategy. How will those objectives be achieved?
  
• Technology. Which vendor or technology can help accomplish the goals?

Read the full article here:
http://adage.com/bookstore/post?article_id=128179

The book also has an accompanying blog here, which I found pretty well designed (which should not be surprising, considering the topic of their book):
http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/

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