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Most of us think of Twitter as a kind of silly application that lets people say things like “John Brian is preparing for the robot uprising” or “Brad thinks the refs blew it in the Caps/Flyers game 7.” It’s chief purpose, so far, is entertainment, with a dash of TMI thrown in.

But lately, I’ve been wondering.

A couple months ago, at South by Southwest, an interview with Mark Zuckerberg famously went awry when the Twitter-feuled audience first started heckling the interviewer, then eventually took over the microphones. (If you are interested, check out this particularly thoughtful account of the event, which includes an amazing video of the interview with a twitter overlay).

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a different conference (the IA Summit) where Twitter was again used by the crowd, but this time in a far more sanguine way, to share information amongst the audience and make insightful comments about the presentations. It probably helped that the audience and the speakers actually knew each other, even if only passingly in some cases.

I got enough value from following the Summit’s twitter feed that I left thinking, could this actually be of value in a corporate setting?

After all, I’ve been to plenty of all-staff meetings, or large team meetings, where people are already bringing their laptops. The larger and longer the meeting, the more likely people are trying to at least keep an eye on their email. So, the technology is already in place in many offices to try adopting a twitter feed. And what is the value of twitter here?

A second, quiet, channel of information.

The bigger the room, the less anyone wants to interrupt the presenter’s flow to ask a question. The more likely the group is to simply go with the flow. If information they need isn’t provided, they might (if they are lucky) get a chance to ask a question afterwards, or they have to spend extra time cornering the presenter. Having a quiet alternate channel of communication is incredibly helpful. In particular, here are a few of the things that you might use twitter for:

1. Request a resource: “Can someone tell me where to find the .pdf that Michael is talking about?
2. Expand on the content: “In addition to the companies listed, Arlene and I have started talking to Widget Co about this”
3. Gauge interest: “I was hoping to hear more about the bonus program. Anyone else?”
4. Brief side conversations: “Alan, should we be using this tool for Project Z? Looks like it might be helpful.”

In this way, having a second, quiet channel of information might increase the usefulness of a large meeting, or even help positively shape the direction of conversation without grinding things to a halt.

What do you think?

If you missed any of the sessions at NTC, you can download the session materials on NTEN’s web site. Browsing these materials won’t replace being there, but can give you some good reference materials.

When MoveOn launched their “Bush in thirty seconds” user generated video contest, they received more than a little flak. Most of this was a function of a media that didn’t quite yet understand that an organization shouldn’t be held accountable for everything their supporters say. Since then, more organizations have opened up to user-generated content, though there are still a few goofy stories of using online supporters against an organization, by and large, the press has come to accept that there’s a difference between an organization hosting content and endorsing it.

That might be one of the reasons that MoveOn’s new user-generated video contest, “Obama in thirty seconds” has been more popular than its predecessor. As of last Tuesday, MoveOn brought in more than 1100 submissions for the contest (that’s almost 8 hours of total video!), and had more than 2 million votes in less than 24 hours (compared to 2.9 million total in 2004). Since then, votes continued to cascade in - when voting closed, more than 4.7 million votes were cast for the first round.

Why was this contest so much more popular than its predecessor? And what can non-profits learn from MoveOn’s success in this arena? The answers to these, and other questions, plus my favorite videos, below the fold…

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Editor’s  note: Periodically, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors. All of us Beaconfire are civic-minded, volunteering and donating to a wide range of non-profit organizations. This week, we thought we’d ask: What non-profit organization would you want to work with and why?

Kesah, Client Manager: I would love to have the opportunity to work with the Tipitina’s Foundation.  They provide support for Louisiana’s music community and strive to preserve  the state’s musical culture.  After Hurricane Katrina they were quick to respond to the needs of New Orleans’ displaced musicians and continue to help in the rebuilding effort.  Their Music Office Co-ops provide technical resources and training for local artists.  This organization supports New Orleans, music, and technology, all things I am passionate about.

Tim, Functional Consultant: I’d love for Beaconfire to be working with a LGBT advocacy organization like the Human Rights Campaign.  They are a great organization who seem commited to online advocacy and put a lot of energy into furthering debate on issues of concern to the LGBT community.  They use Convio for their campaigns, and given the issues they are concerned with, it seems like they would be a great fit with Beaconfire.

Marissa, Functional Consultant: I would love to work with True Majority. I love their mission, I love Ben Cohen’s ice cream, and I love their Oreo cookie piece. True Majority gives progressive activism a sense of humor backed by logic and facts. I’ve been carrying around the True Majority Scroll Pen for years.

Kate, Administrative Assistant: I would like to work with RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network,) because I very much admire their work, and because I think that their online crisis hotline is a very innovative use of technology. It can be very daunting for a survivor of sexual assault to pick up the phone and talk about it with someone they’ve never met, and RAINN has addressed this with a way for survivors to get the information they need from a real live person via secure IM. Personally, I don’t even order pizza delivery from anyone who doesn’t have an online ordering option, as I find the phone call far too daunting.  With this in mind, I have no problem believing that far more people will be accessing RAINN’s counselors than before.

Milo, Marketing Consultant: I’d love to work with a client who’s completely native to the Web (like Kiva, Moveon.org, Google.org, etc.).  These organizations are comfortable in the online environment and like to bush the medium’s boundaries. As a result, they’re consistently breaking new ground in the online campaigning space.

John Brian, Marketing Consultant: I’d love to work with Americans for the Arts – they’ve got a great mission, a constituency that would be fun to market to online, and a trusted national brand. It would also be nice to get some use of my arts admin degree again!

Taylor, Software Engineer: I would love to work with Habitat for Humanity.  There impact is equally seen locally as well as all over the world.  I like that the organization focuses on getting people involved and to volunteer their skills just as much as is does raising donations. 

I am also a big fan of Grassroot Soccer because it uses the international passion of playing soccer to unite people in the fight against AIDS.

Finally it would be great to work with the ONE campaign because of the hundreds of great organizations that it unites (including some of our clients, Heifer, Bread for the World and The Hunger Project).

These are just a few of the many, many non-profits we’d love to work with. Are you looking to redesign your website, add some kick to your marketing work, or transition to a new software solution? Give us a call - we’d love to see how we can help you reach your goals!

Beaconfire has been working with IUE-CWA to redesign their Web site over the past few months, and the site went live last week. Built on the GetActive CMS/CRM platform, it includes several new and innovative features, a completely new aesthetic, and substantially more content than the previous site.

One interesting addition to the site is a Recommended Reading area tied to specific pages through the site. The content of this area, which is links to external Web sites and resources, is managed through a Del.icio.us tagging system. This enables IUE-CWA to have any number of people within the organization easily flag relevant links as they are browsing the Web and push them out to their Web site (via a Del.icio.us RSS feed) within an appropriate context.

Another area of the site uses a Spry-based widget combined with Yahoo Pipes to automatically populate relevant news from a number of sources, and allows the user to browse through the news via a simple back/forward/pause mechanism. The feed itself will be an ever-evolving creature – as time goes by, sources will be added and removed, and new filters will be applied, leading to a more relevant and powerful tool iteratively over time.

As part of the redesign process, we worked with IUE-CWA to take a substantial amount of their print materials and convert them for use on the Web. This should greatly improve the availability and distribution of key information to their various audiences.

To take a look at the new site, visit http://www.iue-cwa.org.

RSS doesn’t get enough credit. Most people still think of some high-tech thing that only high-tech types or content junkies use. While I’ll admit that I’m an RSS addict (Yeah, I’ve super-revved up my NetVibes) chances are you, and the entire Internet-using world, are using RSS feeds more than you realize.

Anyone using iGoogle is taking in RSS feeds. Don’t believe me? Just look at the CNN widget on iGoogle. Take a look at the URL. That’s an RSS Feed. Use MyYahoo? Then you, too, use RSS Feeds.

So what’s the moral of this story? Don’t be afraid of RSS. It’s worth taking in, as well as sending out. Consuming some RSS feeds on your Web site can help your visitors find valuable related resources and keep your site up-to-date without constantly having to add content yourself. Sending out your own RSS feeds can keep your readership (both RSS junkies and light content consumers) up-to-date on your organization’s latest news.

It’s 10:00 pm, do you know where your AdWords are (pointing)? No, not another campaign ad, but a question that non-profits should be asking themselves in light of a new Google policy regard AdWords and redirects. According to their help center (emphasis mine),

Based on feedback from both our advertisers and users, and consistent with our efforts to present relevant results, we’ll no longer allow certain exceptions to our display URL policy. These include, but aren’t limited to, redirects and vanity URLs. In line with our existing policy, we’ll continue to require that your ad’s display URL matches its destination URL (the URL of your landing page). This policy will be strictly enforced for new ads, regardless of previous exceptions.

What this boils down to is that you can no longer send users to a different domain than the one you use in the display URL. This means, for users of many popular CRM systems, that you’ll have to display the name of your CRM instead of your organization in the your ad, if your donation or advocacy page is located there.

While it may be bad for non-profits, it’s overall a sensible policy. What likely happened is one too many ads pretended to be useful information like you’d find in organic search, only to turn around and be a business site. For example an ad for “XBox start on fire again?” with a display URL that says Microsoft would seem to be a public service announcement that would tell you what to do about it (hint: it involves a fire extinguisher). But what if that link went to Best Buy instead so you could buy a replacement? Google is doing what’s best for their users.

One way around this restriction is to send users to a landing page first instead of directly going to your advocacy or fundraising pages. This will also let you create a reinforcement of the text of your ad and help users get to the right page next. While you want to minimize the number of clicks to completion to minimize drop-off, a well written and formatted landing page can keep people from bouncing off and increase conversions.

The new AdWord rules are going to require some creative responses by non-profits and other marketers, but it’s worth examining carefully how you’ll build your ads. With the display URL comprising one quarter of your AdWord, you can’t afford not to have this vital reinforcement of your brand. I’ll be interested to see how major CRMs to help them make their ads effective. For more on the policy, and answers to your questions about it, check out the AdWords Google Group.

Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved maps. Maybe I’m a little travel deprived, or maybe it’s from reading too much National Geographic, but I could spend hours pouring over them. Google Maps now lets us all take our map fascination to the next level: over the past few years they’ve given us multiple views, fantastic (and sometimes astonishing) detail, driving directions, and even the ability to create custom content. This last feature let us build a cool mashup for the National Parks Conservation Association, resulting in a visualization of places where development threatens our national parks.

There are two ways to create custom Google maps. The first and most common is using the API, a code library released by Google that allows anyone who knows a little code to build their own map, with a high degree of customization. The catch is the code; if you don’t know Javascript, the API is pretty much off limits. But don’t despair! Google also offers a user-friendly My Maps interface. All you need is a free Google account, and you can create maps with placemarks, paths, and text bubbles. You add content through the click-and-drag interface. You can even insert pictures, if you upload them to a web photo service. My Maps is the interface we chose for creating maps for NPCA, due to the speed and ease of adding elements.

My Maps has some nice features: (more…)

Eye tracking has been around since the 1990s, but it holds a science fiction-like fascination for many people (it certainly does for me). The concept is incredibly cool; the results are striking and visual; and the studies make clever use of technology. The idea behind eye tracking as part of usability testing is to determine where users actually look when they use a website. Using specially designed technology (sometimes mounted on a helmet worn by the user, sometimes embedded in the computer screen), testers can produce a “heat map” showing where the user’s eyes travel, and how much time they spend there. Just as telling, the heat map leaves dark any area that the user doesn’t even see; if these blind spots contain information that you need your users to see, it may be time to rethink your design. These are the sort of concrete-looking test results that anyone would love to plug into a PowerPoint presentation; they appear to speak for themselves.

A sample eye tracking “heat map” (www.useit.com)

Like any usability test, however, eye tracking doesn’t tell you much on its own; it is most effective when the tester asks good questions and interprets the results in context. Task-oriented tests are especially helpful because the heat map suggests how the user went about completing the task, and may reveal unexpected barriers. For example, one study asked participants to find the current U.S. population on the Census Bureau website. Though the number appeared in large text on the homepage, only about 14% of participants saw and recognized it, due to design choices on the page - perhaps because the information was formatted like an ad.
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National Parks Conservation Association just launched an innovative campaign to expand America’s parklands called “FOR SALE: America’s Heritage.” The focus for the campaign is the recent report by NPCA - “America’s Heritage for Sale” - which identifies substantial tracks of land within national park boundaries that could fall prey to real estate developers if the governments does not approve the funds to purchase the land.

The Beaconfire team’s created a Google mashup using data from NPCA on park boundaries and the land within those boundaries that is vulnerable to development. The map lets constituents visualize the land at risk which heightens the understanding of the dangers to our parks. You can zoom around the map to see the parks across the country, zoom in on a park and area of the land threatened. If you’re not into panning and zooming, just pick a park from the drop down to go directly to it.

If you click on a pin or region, you can learn about the affected area and how cheap it would be for the government to buy the land — to buy the land in the top 10 parks is a mere $50 million.

After checking out the map to see some parks in peril, you can sign the petition to tell Congress to approve the cash the National Park service needs. The Google Map displays in a native Convio advocacy campaign page. You can tell your friends about the map or become an NPCA member, since the more members they have, the more Congress will listen. You can also Digg the map and petition (http://digg.com/environment/McMansions_in_National_Parks or share it with your friends on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://ga1.org/campaign/lwcf).

Congrats to the NPCA team for their great work on their report and to the Beaconfire team for an innovative representation of what’s at stake in America’s parks!