To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Five Social Media Must-Haves for Crisis | Social Media Today – "Organizations and businesses that don't plan for crisis will be left behind when the inevitable happens. Thorough crisis plans don't have to be 50 pages long, but you need to have one. Your organization's crisis plan should include a social piece in the communications section. Real-time is the fastest way to join the conversation, provide help and information, and direct the messages. Social helps you be your own media. So, how can social media play a positive role in crisis? Here are five social media must-haves in crisis."
• Online Competitions: Lessons from MIT’s Service Innovation Challenge  – Online Fundraising, Advocacy, and Social Media – frogloop – "For the last three years we’ve worked at the MIT Public Service Center – in collaboration with the MIT Alumni Association, MIT150, and numerous stakeholders – to translate a campus-based innovation competition into an online platform that engages the worldwide MIT community. We’ve cracked the competition process open, leveraging a combination of workflows and social tools to produce a compelling experience of real participation in key activities. We’d like to share a few of our major aims and reflect a bit on some lessons learned that we hope will guide our approach in the future and prove helpful to others designing competitions, challenges, and prize giveaways online – in particular those focused on social benefit and public service. We are indebted to our partners at Idea Couture for their thoughtful, patient, imaginative, and generous work with us. "
• Azavea – Augmented Reality for Cultural Institutions – Augmented Reality by PhillyHistory.org – What do you do with 93,000+ historical photographs and the power of Augmented Reality on smart phones? Azavea explores this topic in a newly released whitepaper and documents how they built a prototype mobile app (for iPhone and Android) that overlays historical photos on the modern city streets of Philadelphia.
• Making Stories Work for Your Org: What the Data Says | NTEN – "Don't count on a personal story to transform your fundraising appeal. Instead, tell stories that explain your mission and your impact. Recognize that these stories aren't enough to compel someone to give. In the story that gets people to give, the donor — not the organization — is the hero."
• Twin Cities marketers queuing up with QR codes – TwinCities.com – A great example of an interesting way to use QR codes! "Visitors to Chino Latino restaurant in Minneapolis recently found something new sticking out of their drinks. The paper umbrellas were gone, replaced with a diminutive, square-shaped code made up of black and white rectangles. If this had happened two or three years ago, the visitors likely would have been baffled. But now, a rapidly increasing number of them know what to do: Whip out their smart phones, fire up an app that can decipher the code and discover where it leads. "

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Freakonomics » Ten Reasons Why I Would Never Donate to a Major Charity (How to Be a Superhero, Part 2) – "“Giving to Charity” is another myth we fervently uphold as part of the Great American Religion — just like “own a home” or “send your kids to college.” It’s time we stop blindly believing in mythology. I’m not saying don’t give. I’m not saying don’t be spiritual or don’t be good. But do it with thoughtfulness, with true spirit, with a true desire to help. More harm than good is done when you blindly throw money at most charities."
• eAdvocacy Readiness Assessment – A terrific round up of resources from Aspiration – if you're looking to get started with or ramp up your online engagement efforts, check out these tools first! "Welcome to the pre-release version of Aspiration's eAdvocacy Readiness Tools. Aspiration uses these tools to help organizations identify deficits and establish best practices in their eAdvocacy work. These tools are in beta-test phase and available to users like you to help us make them better and more useful to you. We invite you to let us know about any problems you encounter by emailing tools@answr.net. We'd also love to hear your suggestions about how to make the tools more useful for you."
• Are you writing the blog posts that people are looking for? | Natasha Judd – Great post from Natasha with tips for getting more targeted with your blog content! "Blog entries are a great way to bring people to your website. They provide fresh content related to your organisation or business – the type of fresh content that search engines love. Other bloggers are also more likely to link to your blog posts than the home page (or services page) of your website, and those links can bring both referred traffic and a higher ranking on search engines. So, how do you create the sort of content that people are looking for and linking to?"
• Facebook Flap Puts Girl Scouts In Center of Controversy – Social Philanthropy – The Chronicle of Philanthropy- Connecting the nonprofit world with news, jobs, and ideas – The Chronicle has a great story covering an opportunity for organizations to learn from side-steps of others instead of repeating disaster: "Girl Scouts of the USA found itself at the center of a social-media controversy this month when the Rainforest Action Network, an environmental group, used Facebook to protest the group’s use of an ingredient in the cookies it sells to raise money."
• Videos Posted by Non-Profits on Facebook: Non-Profit Resource Center [HQ] – Looking for tips and resources for building up your organization's presence on facebook? Well, the folks at facebook have put it all in one place for you! A couple notes: there are PDF guides you can download and a "share your story" feature so you can highlight the way you use facebook and get attention for all your hard work. Check it out!

There are many opportunities to see hashtags in action!  There are also more and more opportunities emerging for people to coordinate global conversations that happen at the same time, instead of disconnected over time (still tied together via hashtag).  I am part of the planning team working on the monthly chat series behind #4Change.  There is also a Twitter-based chat starting up for consultants who work with social benefit organizations.

I wanted to share some of the lessons I’ve learned from my involvement with organizing Twitter chats.  I’m looking forward to your ideas, too!

1. Build a landing pad

It is helpful to have some place where you can send people interested in your topic or chat that haven’t participated before – whether it’s a website, a blog, or just a separate Twitter account.  If you have a landing pad somewhere online where you can refer people and provide information about your chats, your group, or your purpose in more than 140 characters, it will save you a lot of extra tweeting!  Plus, it will provide a natural and obviously place to aggregate your content, thoughts, updates, and promotion of the chats.

2. Brainstorm lots of questions but pick a few

It seems obvious that people using a communication tool like Twitter, and then electing to participate in a large-scale public chat would not require much prodding to keep conversation going.  But, it is actually just this reason that it’s more important to pre-select your questions.  Twitter chats are slower moving than you’d expect because everyone is waiting on the Twitter search to refresh with new posts.  It works best to have 3-5 questions selected ahead of time and shared with a core group of chat leaders or guides.  This way, there is a group of people helping keep the conversation on track, focused on one question at a time.  Otherwise, the group can quickly and easily splinter off to other topics using other hashtags, after all, that’s what Twitter enables all day, every day.

3. Consider your time

If you really want to pull in participants from all over the world, it’s important to consider what time you are holding the chat.  It’s also important to consider how long you want the chat to be.  Knowing that Twitter based chats are slower in development and pace than something like a live web chat, you don’t want it to be too narrow of a window, but you can only hold people’s attention for so long as well.

4. Narrow your focus

#4Change or #NPCons (nonprofit consultants) seem like pretty obvious topics. But coordinating a conversation would be far too difficult without a specific topic for that chat because the possibilities for questions or specific ideas within those two general topics are endless.  For example, recent 4Change topics have included using competitions for social change and Twitter as a political/revolutionary tool.  This also means people can identify ahead of time any resources they want to share during the chat and if they are interested in the specific topic of the month or not.

5. Invite your audience

If you have your topic for the month picked out, you may have some experts, prominent thinkers, or maybe organizations/companies/ groups that are known for working in or with that topic that you want to explicitly invite to participate.  Ensuring that fresh voices participate is important – we could all talk to the same group of people without organizing a public conversation.  Promoting the chat widely via Twitter and other social networks is a great way to find more participants, too.

6. Never underestimate the technology

I already mentioned that Twitter-based chats aren’t as fast-paced as live web chats or some other technologies.  But, you also have to remember that Twitter isn’t in your control!  If the server has a glitch, if there’s scheduled maintenance, or if search tools lag, then your Twitter chat will dramatically suffer.  This happened during the July #4Change chat and caused us to call the chat off half-way through as search was 15 minutes behind and many participants’ messages weren’t showing up at all.

7. Participate!

#4Change:
If you want to learn more about the #4Change monthly chat series, visit http://4change.memeshift.com  The next chat topic will be announced there and on Twitter using #4Change.

#NPCons:
Join the first #NPCons chat this coming Tuesday, 21 July, at 1pm US Pacific time.  These chats will be monthly, on the 3rd Tuesdays, at 1 pm Pacific.