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).

• Salesforce Acquires Buddy Media for $689 Million – “Salesforce has entered an agreement to acquire social media marketing platform Buddy Media for approximately $689 million, the company has announced. The price is lower than the recently reported $800 million figure, but still a formidable investment from the enterprise software giant, which is on a seemingly never-ending acquisition spree. Salesforce had acquired collaboration tool company Stypi in May 2012, as well as social media monitoring platform Radian6 in March 2011.”
• 4 Results from Crowdsource Experiment at #12NTC: Nerd, Geek and Gear Herding « Sage Words – “At the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference (#12NTC) in San Francisco, California, we led a session called Nerd, Geek, and Gear Herding 2.0. Building on last year’s session, we were pleased that this year we had the opportunity to introduce the “crowdsourcing” experiment to collectively solve our nonprofit technology problems.”
• Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings | Official Google Blog – “Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily. Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words. But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.”
• The Identity Spectrum – Identity Woman – I love this spectrum map of the various kinds of online identity! Such a great resource for understanding and planning for community engagement. “The Identity Spectrum gives a understanding of the different kinds of identity that are possible in digital systems. They are not exclusive – you can mix and match. I will define the terms below and discuss mixing and matching below.”
• Current.org | Evaluating social media efforts, May 2012 – “Now that most public media stations have become active on social networks — with some combination of Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, blogs and YouTube channels — staff members at many stations are struggling with the question: Are we getting the most bang for our social-media buck? After all, building and maintaining a meaningful social media presence requires a significant investment of time — and it’s not always easy to measure the return on that investment. What does social media success look like, anyway?”
• New Study: Donations Decline for Nonprofits – Online Fundraising, Advocacy, and Social Media – – “Of the different trend-spotting and benchmarking resources, few are as important and authoritative as the “donorCentrics Index of National Fundraising Performance” published quarterly by Target Analytics, a division of Blackbaud. Yesterday in Washington, DC, Target’s senior fundraising analyst Paige Grainger gave a terrific “state of the nonprofit industry” talk, which summarized key findings from Target’s latest, 2011 Index. The full report is here.  Paige spoke at a luncheon that Care2 sponsored of the Direct Marketing Association of Washington (DMAW). Target’s data this year was drawn from 80 different nonprofit organizations, 38 million donors, 79 million gifts and $2.5 billion worth of donations revenue (although it excluded any donations worth $10,000 or more). Channels covered included online, direct mail, telemarketing and canvassing.”

The ability to search online has changed our lives. It’s true. To Google something is a verb that you can look up in the dictionary now. What has it done?

• Because of search, it no longer matters how many pages there are on the Web, because search can find what you are looking for.
• Because of search, it no longer matters how many blog posts I write, because search can find the relevant ones for me or my readers.
• Because of search, it no longer matters how many photos we post online or where we post them, because search can filter out our tags and codes.
• Because of search, it no longer matters whether you are a blogger or a company, because search will sift the most active conversations to the top.

We are so used to searching online now that we can’t get away from it, rather, we don’t want to browse the web without it. Instead of going to Google.com to search the Web, we have search tools (often powered by Google) in our browsers, on our website and on our blogs, and everywhere else really.

Enter Twitter.

Twitter has created the most up-to-the minute archive of conversations around the world.  And guess what many of those conversations include: links.  We can see, through using Twitter Search, the public timeline, or Trending, what topics are popular, what links are being shared, and more.  These are things you can’t necessarily find in a Google search.  So it’s no wonder that there are preliminary talks between the two companies.

So, what’s the advantage for nonprofits?

There’s a reason that SEO (search engine optimization) consultants are so busy with work—lots and lots of companies and organizations of all sizes want to increase their standing in the millions of search results returned when you look up their key words in a search. But with Twitter, it isn’t static.  It’s constantly, right now, with every second, changing. Because it’s all conversation.

Nonprofits are already on Twitter and are joining every day as more and more organizations recognize opportunities to use the tool to connect with their communities online in real-time and leverage the communication tool to expand their campaigns and communications. As search continues to become more dynamic for Twitter users and integrated more and more into the process of finding and contributing to conversations as well as finding information and resources, nonprofits are in a terrific position to greatly influence the community.

For example…  [Read the full post here.]

What do you think? Have you found people, organizations, or resources via Twitter that you couldn’t find otherwise? Would love to hear what you think!

You can add your comments and thoughts here or on the SSIR blog.