I recently took a look at three of the most popular utilities for social sharing: ShareThis, AddThis, and Gigya. After conducting a review, AddThis came out on top as the best system for most users. Gigya, especially with it’s recent integration with Convio, might be your best bet depending on your needs.

Gigya, in addition to the standard social sharing options, also allows for Single Sign On, allowing users to bypass the standard account creation process. Instead, it allows users to use their Facebook, Twitter and other credentials and also allows for user interactions with the widget (e.g. sharing content) to be recorded in Convio. While it is highly powerful and customizable, be aware that setting up Gigya requires significantly more time and effort than setting up most social sharing widgets (even if you only use their social sharing features).

One concern with Gigya’s service is that sharing content through their widget prompts users to provide access permissions to their profile data on Facebook (see screenshot, right). While this may provide additional audience data, users may be wary of the privacy implications of this somewhat unusual request (for a sharing widget) and therefore it will likely have the effect of reducing clickthrough rates. Gigya also offers a simple sharing plugin which does not send a request for permission.

ShareThis and AddThis have had significant feature differentiation in the past, but as time progressed they have largely mimicked each other’s feature sets. Currently, there are a limited set of functional differences between them, primarily focused on default aesthetics and ease of customization.

• Customization: AddThis is generally preferred by developers due to an API that is easier to use, but the ShareThis API can typically accomplish the same tasks (though potentially at a higher development cost). One of the few differentiators between the two services is in the customization of which buttons are shared. Both services, by default, show sharing icons to each user based on their previous sharing history (across all sites using the platform). If, for example, someone typically shares via MySpace on other sites, the MySpace icon will appear in the sharing box on the very first time that the user visits a site. It’s possible to force a listing of pre-determined icons using AddThis, but that level of customization is unavailable with ShareThis (or it is not documented).
• Privacy Policy: AddThis received negative publicity several years ago for their use of a flash cookie which recorded a user’s browsing preferences across sites, with non-personally identifying demographic and historical visit information later being sold to advertisers. This practice is common among these services (including ShareThis and Gigya), but they received additional criticism due to the fact that the AddThis Flash cookie revived cookies that had been deleted. AddThis no longer engages in this practice.

• Reporting: Both AddThis and ShareThis integrate with Google Analytics to report on sharing, but neither provides the user-level actions that makes Gigya compelling.

• Clickthroughs: While there may be difference in clickthrough rates between these services, no testing has been done. Even so, scattered reports have suggested people find the AddThis hover menu to be easier to use than the ShareThis version.

AddThis widget (on hover)	ShareThis widget (on hover)

Conclusion: Based on most organization’s needs, the easy extensibility of AddThis is probably ideal. If single sign on is desired, or tracking by user (with Convio integration), Gigya’s software may be the best fit.

For more sophisticated sharing (i.e. allowing people’s Facebook posts on a topic to appear directly on your webpage), check out Disqus or Echo.

Among other goals, AFT engaged Beaconfire to redesign their 5-year old site to balance the needs of multiple audiences with a more modern and inviting look and feel. Our redesign process involved stakeholder interviews, a creative visioning exercise, a review of peer organizations, a card sorting exercise to gather user input and developing personas representing AFT’s target audiences, in addition to our typical discovery process of defining goals, audiences and features. All these steps resulted in a new information architecture and visual design for the site. In addition to the design, Beaconfire re-engineered the AFT Voices feature on the web site that asks their members to share their voice on important questions and issues for their professions and their constituencies. The new design was implemented by OmniUpdate, AFT’s CMS software vendor.

The new Voices tool automates what was a very manual and time consuming process for posting questions to and comments by members on the website. The new tool has an administrative console where AFT editors can create and publish questions, receive email notifications, moderate and publish responses, and view statistics on questions and comments. It allows members to post their comments and a photo real time, and to vote and rate others’ responses; Editor’s picks and highly rated comments sort to the top. Previously, AFT manually inputted questions and comments from their print publications onto the website, which only enabled them to post a fraction of the number of actual comments received.

The new look and feel, and the Voices tool in particular, have helped to achieve two other key goals for the site – to engage and interact with members online, and allow more members to see themselves on the site and to understand they are part of a larger movement. It’s been a pleasure working with the nice folks at the AFT to make their goals come true!

Not really… but the much anticipated Google Wave has arrived in “preview” mode. When Google says “preview,” they mean “we can’t call it beta yet”, and it’s available through a limited number of invitations to people who are willing to deal with lots of bugs in order to get an early peek at this tool.

The idea behind Wave is that email has been around, mostly unchanged, for a long time – so Wave purports to be what email would have been if it were developed using today’s technology and for today’s web user. Not everyone feels that Google’s description of Wave is accurate, however. Daniel Tenner blogged recently that Wave is not communications 2.0 at all, saying:

“Is Wave the next Twitter? Nope. Is it the next Facebook? Nope. Is it going to replace Instant Messengers? Possibly, in some circumstances, but not any time soon.. I believe this is partly Google’s fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it’s a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer.”

Confused yet? Check out a new collaborative user manual, read Lifehacker’s introduction, or Google’s hefty hour-long demo (below), and you’ll have a good idea of what it’s all about.

A few of us at Beaconfire were lucky enough to get early invites to check it out for ourselves, and we spent some time this week stumbling around the tool, learning the ropes. The result is this post, co-authored by Jo, Amadie and Tim.

Clearly Google Wave is still very rough around the edges, not yet ready for public consumption, but it feels full of potential. Lots of people have been brainstorming cool uses for it. We started to wonder where it could go – and as non-profit consultants, what could it mean for us?  So we co-authored this post (in Wave!) to think about that question.

So let’s imagine that in 5 years, Wave is the new Thing To Do on the web, it’s matured into a full-featured product, and it’s met all Google’s goals of becomingemail 2.0. (Maybe it’s Google Wave, or maybe it’s another tool with the same vision.) What does it mean for non-profits?

For one thing, the “email blast” will no longer make sense. Heck, according to the Wall Street Journal, email is practically dead already. It will probably be possible to send out static, un-editable messages, but doing so neglects the best features of the tool. Some non-profits will probably send out “wave blasts” (the same non-profits who are now tweeting their press releases), but most will be listening to their subscribers and collaborating with them on a more intense level than even Facebook or Twitter currently allow. This could be an incredibly cool thing, especially for small, grassroots organizations who really want to connect with the people.

The barrier between your website and your “email” (now Wave) list will shrink almost to non-existence. You can embed your waves in your site, and parts of your site in your waves. Conversations can take place both on subscriber’s own Wave accounts and on publicly accessible webpages, and flow seamlessly between the two. Not only that, but your supporters won’t have to visit your website to donate or take action. With Wave’s open framework, it’ll only be a matter of time before you can put a “write to Congress” widget in your wave, so users can write a letter on the spot (or even help each other write personalized letters), send it, and put their name on a list of signers that’s immediately visible to other participants in the wave. Imagine the impetus to act if you can literally watch other people taking action as you read an appeal. (You can’t do that with a Facebook app!)

Committees, boards, and affiliates all can benefit from the collaborative nature of waves. From developing agendas to conducting subcommittee or ad hoc group projects to collaborating on or reviewing white papers or other group documents, it is possible to bypass the back-and-forth emails and multiple document versions that plague the managers of these projects.

Conferences can become richer experiences, with longer lifespans. Have you ever tried to follow a conference through attendees’ tweets? A wave can organize the backchannel chatter into nearly coherent topical (and perhaps even substantive) conversations and avoid the headache of paging through endless (and often repetitive) hashtags ordered only by timestamps.

For now, those lucky enough to have received invitations are not only struggling to find enough other users to create waves with, but with what to “wave” about at all. While Google bills this as the next generation of email, it really feels more like a business collaboration tool than a 2.0 communication engine. But Wave is open source and Google plans to release the code so that you can set up your own Wave server, using whatever email addresses or usernames you want and build custom applications on top of it. Only time will tell what those applications are and whether they influence, or even change, the way that non-profits do business.

These changes are institutional and my message mostly fell on deaf ears. One did get back to me and asked if I could help them as part of their student volunteer staff. We’ll cover that in another article.

The problem of adding such functionality is that it can be a chore if the content itself is not ready for sharing. For example, PDFs are never good material to link to on facebook, because they won’t create a nice looking story feed item. Pages that don’t have images won’t look nice either. Apart from cosmetic errors which can be a hurdle to success in implementing these simple tools, time and effort are always a problem for busy organizations.

There is an easy solution provided by wibiya. They offer a way for anyone that publishes content to add an interactive web 2.0 toolbar which sits at the bottom of your webpage no matter where a user is on your site. Similar to the “Start” bar in Windows and the “Apple” bar in Mac OS, this utility is very useful.
Although it integrates with Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, and any website well, the best feature I believe is in it’s ability to create a Facebook community.

What does Wibiya say about itself?

“Wibiya enables blogs to integrate the most exciting services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars.
Our platform offers a one-stop solution for integrating, managing and tracking third-party applications.

Currently we offer a fixed set of tools such as creating a blog community via facebook connect,
enabling twitter alerts on your blog and enabling post navigation but there is a lot to wait for as we will be adding more and more application through time.”

I hope you have time to evaluate if this is a useful tool for your organization. It could save you more time and money than you expect.

Last week, it was brought to my attention that Elgg–an open source Social Networking Platform–was holding a conference on Social Media for Education, and a more specific conference on Elgg. I know and understand the needs of Education that the promise of Social Media can bring. I was very glad someone decided to bring people together to talk about it. Since it was on Friday and I was at work that day, I couldn’t make it. Thankfully, I did make the second conference on Saturday.

At ElggCamp Boston 2009, I was able to see the need for the "Social Networking Platform".Speakers made it very clear that Elgg was not for the person that needed to put up a generic social network to link people together. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter do that just fine.

Interactive Campaigns

These campaigns encourage visitors to get involved by recording and contributing their own videos or photos:

• 24 Hours for Darfur has collected over 900 personal video appeals from celebrities, politicians, Darfurians, and citizens around the world. The campaign aims to strengthen Darfur advocacy and enable individuals to send their appeals to political leaders.
• Witness.org – The Hub is an interactive community for human rights, where you can upload your own content or watch, comment on and share content from others. They also provide a great Video Advocacy Toolkit.
• Stand Up 2 Cancer asked visitors to “Submit your own picture or video and tell the world what you stand for! Cancer affects all of us, what are you standing for?” and used the submissions to create this video.
• The Prince’s Rainforests Project allows you to Create Your Own Frog Message, a personalized campaign video featuring you alongside the project’s well-known supporters. Your custom video can then be shared with friends.
• MomsRising.org’s Mother’s Day campaign prompts visitors to “Enter the name of your favorite mom,” then generates a customized video that’s extremely easy to distribute.
• The Humane Society’s Knock Out Animal Fighting video contest generated thousands of votes and landed two videos on YouTube’s homepage.
• DoSomething.org holds an annual video contest for teenagers and young adults that grants $100,000 to the winner’s cause.

Stand-alone, viral campaigns

Rather than belonging to a collection or gallery, these videos stand on their own. They’re often longer in length and housed on a page that provides opportunities for visitors to share and learn more. These types of videos make the biggest impact when they go “viral,” spreading from person to person through word of mouth and social networks.

• Charity:Water raised over $10,000 in one day, using YouTube’s new overlay ad feature.
• The Girl Effect uses a minimalist design and clear calls to action: Learn, Share, Change.
• Save the Bay supplements the embedded video with statistics and a variety of ways to get involved: Share, donate, sign up for updates, etc.

Video Galleries

Unlike the stand-alone videos above, these pages allow visitors to browse a collection of videos that give an in-depth feel for a cause or provide education on topics:

If you’ve made it through this list and want to see even more examples, check out DoGooder.tv’s Non Profit Video Awards and YouTube’s Non-Profit channel.

These icons are not merely shortcuts to the sites that the represent, they actually perform an action associated with the function of that site.  As such, they are more like little applications than links, per se.  I’d say that there are three main reasons to put an application-like shortcut to anything, social network or otherwise, on your website:

1. To give your visitors a quicker way to accomplish something they already do
2. To demonstrate that you are the kind of site that does this sort of thing
3. To educate your users and try to get them to start doing something about which didn’t already know

Let’s look at an example: The RSS icon is there so that people who already subscribe to RSS feeds can quickly add your feed to their aggregator, but it is also there to simply let people know that you have an RSS feed.  So the RSS feed icon accomplishes both #1 and #2.  How about #3?  Sure, if they don’t know that the cool little orange icon or the letters “RSS” existed before, then they do now.  But do they have any idea what they mean?  An icon is a terrible way to educate; There just isn’t enough information contained in an icon to tell someone how to do something new.

Social networks are trickier.  With the RSS icon, you are giving your visitors an additional way to receive content that you feel is important.  Now you are asking your users to help promote your content.  And not to just share with a few friends, but to promote your site to thousands of other people.  And who are those people you’re asking your users to promote you to anyway?  More about that later.

What is a social network anyway?  And how will it fit in with your overall strategy?  These are huge questions that I’ll just sort of ignore.  Easier to determine–and something I can now instruct you to do for yourself–is to learn the difference between Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon. Take some time to familiarize yourself with the networks and sites you are considering pointing your users to.  Check out which types of links rise to prominence on the networks you are interested in as well as both the tone of the conversations that result around submissions and the types of people engaging.  Don’t add a “Digg this!” link to all your pages simply because you know that Digg is the biggest and most active social networkout there.  Take a look at Digg and ask yourself if your message fits in there.  It may not.

I would suggest that in nearly every case you are going to be best served by an “email this page to a friend” link and providing a very quick way to accomplish it, but since we’re talking about social networking let’s assume that your heart is absolutely set on adding some links to enable or encourage your users to submit your content to a social network.  Let’s face it, that item #2 in the list up there is hard to get around.  All the Web 2.0 kids are doing social networking these days and if you don’t have those icons (icons = cool) on the pages of your site then people might think that you’re not all forward-y thinking.

Who are your users?  Are they even the kind of people who use social networks?  Have they ever submitted a link to one of these networks before?

Don’t know the answers to these questions?  Maybe you could run a poll on your site for a few weeks and see what your visitors say about their use of social networks.  While you’re at it, check your site’s server logs.  If you have any incoming links from social networks then add shortcut icons specific to those networks.  Also, try to discover who the user was who submitted the links you see in your logs and reach out to them.

Most members of online social networks will never submit anything to the network.  They use it to discover interesting things and rarely participate in the discussions, much less submit something themselves.  After all, it takes work to gain the status you need on a site like Digg or Reddit to get your submissions noticed.

Let’s say that some of your people actually are submitters to social networks.  People who submit links to Digg, Reddit, or one of the other commonly used social networks likely already have a method of doing this, and an icon on your pages is unlikely to help them do so.  Most social networks provide a shortcut that people can add to their browser enabling them to quickly grab a link and some content and begin the submission process.  If, on the other hand, your users are not already regular submitters then it is highly unlikely that their link submission will pick up any traction at all on the social network in question and provide you with any benefit whatsoever.

Looking at some visitor stats from a few client sites who use these types of links, less than 1% of visitors engaged with the social networking shortcuts.  While any traffic is good traffic, it would appear that the value of those visits is lower with what looks to be an increased bounce rate of about 15%.  On the other hand, that’s a pretty decent percentage of visits from social networking sites given the number of people who had used the tool bar to submit the link in the first place.  We can’t necessarily assume a correlation without additional analysis, but it looks decent enough at first glance.

If it sounds like this post is sounding like I’d recommend against adding social network icons to your pages, then that’s partly true and partly (and I do apologize for this) “IT DEPENDS.” In most cases (revisiting the list at the beginning of this post) you will really only be accomplishing #2 and demonstrating to your users that you are the kind of site that participates in Web 2.0-type things.  If this is something you want to communicate, then there certainly isn’t any harm in doing so.

I think it’s a very specific type of content that is successful on sites like Digg and I doubt that most of the organizations we work with would see much from adding this functionality to their sites.  And while the cost of doing so is very, very low, it does add clutter and noise to your pages and I can say with near certainty that one of the first things you said when we (or whoever designed your site) asked for some things that came to mind when you thought about what you wanted your site to “feel” like was “clean and clear…uncluttered.”  Honest, you said that!  I heard you!  Wait a minute…I’ve got it written down here somewhere.

We asked the staff: What’s your favorite example of user-generated content that has been bum rushed by people who resist coloring inside the lines?

Rebecca, Functional Analyst: I read that Amazon’s Tuscan Whole Milk is the product that started the whole review trend about 3 years ago.

Featuring a very impressive Edgar Allen Poe spoof:

Once upon a mid-day sunny, while I savored Nuts ‘N Honey,
With my Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gal, 128 fl. oz., I swore
As I went on with my lapping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at the icebox door.
‘Bad condensor, that,’ I muttered, ‘vibrating the icebox door -
Only this, and nothing more.’

Amadie, Client Manager: One of my favorite examples is the Playmobil Security Check Point toy

Review highlight:

My son said he wants the Playmobil Neighborhood Surveillence System set for Christmas. I’ve heard that the CC TV cameras on that thing are pretty worthless in terms of quality and motion detection, so I think I’ll get him the Playmobil Abu-Gharib Interogation Set instead (it comes with a cute little memo from George Bush).

Erika, Operations Manager: Amazon’s Fresh whole rabbit reviews

A review of the rabbit:

How many weekends have I spent, in the loincloth, knife clenched in my teeth, running through the fields trying to find a rabbit? (A bunch, trust me on this, a bunch.) All so I can have something to sacrifice on the altar once I get to the cave.

Now, with this, home, fix a cocktail, go through the day’s mail, finish my drink and drive over to the cave, yank this carcass out of the box and offer this at the feet of my dark lord and master, boom, done. I’m happy, my dark lord and master is happy, everybody wins.

Other items viewed by the rabbit viewers: Uranium Ore

Miro, Software Engineer: I would have to say that Google-spamming to connect the word George Bush with “miserable failure”. That one is my favorite.

And of course, Colbert trying to get NASA to name the space station module after himself. Or the turtle. Oh well, I’ll admit it, I don’t think Colbert will ever get old for me.

Do you have a favorite? Add it to the comments!

For better or for worse, since the global tipping point of Twitter was reached, everyone wants to be part of the action. If Twitter hasn’t come across your online radar, it’s probably because you are living under the proverbial rock and are a Luddite battling online reality. On second thought, if you are on the internet reading this blog post, then you probably aren’t a Luddite, just a Twitter Luddite. That’s ok. The Twitter sphere of knowledge is small and can be transferred from one person to another in usually a few sentences similar to the 140 character tweets.

Below, I’ve elaborated substantially to show you that there is a way that individuals and organizations can use this tool to keep their relationships better informed. I recognize that the audience for our blog here at Beaconfire  mostly consists of individuals in the non-profit industry. This knowledge however can be used by most anyone in any industry which uses the internet to interact with their customers, clients, constituents, or partners. Businesses and Governments, please utilize this knowledge wisely and don’t be evil. (That means you Google!)

If you are a Government official, please do read up on the latest blunder known as “Twittergate” committed by a few in the German Parliament. Apparently results of secret votes should not be broadcast to the world using the Twitter medium. Oops. Please review your policies and traditions before telling the world how you work and what you work on. That may be a good or bad thing depending on what you do. If our National Security depends on it, don’t tweet it Barack Obama. ;)

We all know that non-profits don’t strive to make money, and can use all the help they can to save whatever money they do have. That’s what we do here at Beaconfire Consulting.

We help non-profits utilize the Internet to benefit their causes and missions because the for profit corporations have all the resources they need to be successful.

After explaining what the commotion is all about, we’ll explore how to publish a stream of information to Twitter without having to hire a college graduate to sit in front of a computer and tweet every update.  Sorry college graduates, there are better things the world can utilize you for. Tweet only if it’s part of a job with larger responsibilities, please. It’ll gain you much more respect. To all those hill staffers who tweet for their Senators and Representatives, this means you.

What is Twitter in Simple Terms?

Here’s what I tell non-technical people: Twitter is like an away message in AIM, a status message in Facebook, Linked In, or MySpace, and what you tell people what is on your mind or what you about to do when people ask you. In this case, instead of you responding to five of your friends asking you "Hey, what do you think about that book you just bought?", you can Tweet:

 "Having recently seen rural and urban India, ‘The White Tiger’ is eerily close to reality but without the bloody mess. Cafe Coffee Day!”.

Here’s what I tell technical people: Twitter is a simple micro blogging service which allows people to put in about 140 characters about what’s going on in their life. This very simple idea has been used now to do many things in many circumstances. There are interfaces to Twitter, as well as third party applications that utilize this API to make the most of what is becoming a global phenomenon.

Our own Ali Cherry wrote an excellent article a year ago “14 Tweets about Twitter” which will give you more perspectives. Brad Lehman—one of our ex employees—wrote “Tweet this! Is Twitter Actually Useful?” to question if Twitter is useful in a corporate scenario. I re-evaluate it’s utility below.

Twitter’s Real World Applications.

Personal

Twitter is a great way to tell your friends what you are doing. As it can interface into almost any application such as Facebook, it’s useful to tweet once, and have your status spread to other places on the internet. Recently using services like Ping.FM and Hellotxt it is possible to write once and have several social media outlets updated automatically. I personally use Ping.FM to update my Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gtalk, and AIM Statuses. Since Ping.FM has an API, the iPhone application Nambu allows me to ‘Ping’ from my iPhone.

Social

Twitter can be used as a way to converse with people asynchronously through replying to their tweets. This conversation can take place with people tweeting from their iPhones, from the Web Site itself, or third party integrated tweet mechanisms built into chat programs such as Digsby. During conferences, people can track each other and have a conversation.

Business

Companies can use Twitter to let their customers know about the latest news on products, services, service changes, events, or announcements. One of our clients—the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation—recently started broadcasting regular Twitter updates as a way to broadcast their latest grant approvals. We’ll look into how Beaconfire helped them achieve this. We didn’t use Artificial Intelligence, but we did configure a Robot to do this for them.

Internet Mashups

Some of the most intriguing uses for Twitter is to graph the tweets on a world map. During election season, any tweets with "Obama", "McCain", or "election" were shown in real time as people posted from around the country and the world. If you go to TwitterEarth, you’ll visualize what I’m describing on a three-dimensional globe. All of the tweets in the "twittersphere" are available through the Twitter or Twitter Search API. There are certain applications being developed on the SalesForce.com which integrate Twitter’s data to your CRM. You can monitor if people are talking well or ill about your products and services behind your back.

The Twitter Framework: “How to change the world with Twitter”

The Twitter framework is a representation of how small messages moving to and from people through various applications can make people’s lives a little easier and sometimes a little more hectic. Once people are hooked, they will have to keep tweeting. One could say the same about blogging, riding a bike, or playing golf.

I speculate that in the near future in Business, the Twitter model will be used to standardize how business talk to each other when it comes to messages. Businesses use the Internet in various capacities. The standard messages such as "Your bill is due", to "There’s an update to our catalog, please download it immediately" will be transformed with small messages in the small business arena.

Account executives will know to act upon a delinquent client, or an unsatisfied customer because they will receive a short, sweet message that tells them to act.

I will write more on this as this is another topic altogether. Do you think that

“How to change the world with Twitter”

is too lofty an article title? Maybe. We change the world every day here at Beaconfire using the Internet so it might not be that farfetched. We’ll see.

Publishing content to Twitter, Facebook

Tweeting

How do you tweet? You can tweet from twitter.com by logging on to the website. You can tweet using TweetDeck, a lightweight application that runs on Adobe AIR. You can tweet using iPhone applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, and Nambu. You can tweet using IM clients such as Digsby. It might only be another year and you’ll see that the verb “tweet” get the same respect as the verb “google”.

Update Facebook and Twitter

How to update your Facebook Profile, Facebook Fan Page Status, and Twitter Simultaneously? It’s simple. If you sign up for the aforementioned Ping.FM service, your updates will be broadcast to any number out of the 40 or so social networks that they have including Twitter and Facebook. (More details below.)

RSS to Facebook and Twitter

How do you automatically post to Facebook and Twitter? A RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a published piece of information in a standardized XML format which can be consumed by any number of tools including Portals, Browsers, and email readers. It’s been popularized by blog users as a way to aggregate several blogs into one readable format.

If you have a blog or website that has regular updates and are currently publishing a generated RSS feed, you can capitalize on this on your efforts to tweet automatically. If you are confident that your site’s RSS feed will be available at all times, then you can by pass using a third party service like FeedBurner.

Once you have a stable RSS feed, go and login to TwitterFeed. TwitterFeed uses OpenID for authentication, so if you have a Google, Yahoo, AOL, or any other OpenID provider, you can login easily.

Once logged in, and after clicking on "Go to your feeds", you’ll be able to create a new feed. You’ll note that at the very top, you can create a Twitter, Ping.FM, Laconica, or a Hellotxt feed. This means that once published, all updates from your RSS feed will be broadcast on that medium.

In the process of creating your TwitterFeed (which ever medium you chose), you’ll have to specify and test your RSS feed, and specify if you want to use any of the existing URL shortening services. There are many. I recommend bit.ly. (You can use your bit.ly account as well.) You should also read Jo’s article : “URL shorteners: how to stay out of trouble”.

Be wary of how often you want your feed to be scanned. If your RSS has unique permalinks, publish dates, and GUIDs, you don’t have to  be too worried about anything. If you uncheck the “Sorted” checkbox, and have have unique GUIDs and permalinks, you can publish a hundred items in your RSS feed and TwitterFeed will tweet the specified amount of items every time it scans. This is useful if you want to tweet numerous updates. If you do check the “Sorted” checkbox, the TwitterFeed service will only post the latest item.

We published the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation’s Microblog Feed using FeedBurner. You can see how we chose to format the RSS.

Why use Ping.FM and Hellotxt rather than Twitter in TwitterFeed to publish your feed?

The answer is a no brainer. Both services relay your post to Twitter as well as many others. Ping.FM and Hellotxt can subsequently publish to numerous other social media outlets as mentioned before.

If you are a global organization with a need to be everywhere at once, having your message on all these sites could be helpful to you. I don’t know anyone that updates all of these at once, but if you do, you must have something really important to say.

If you are a non-profit organization and your message to save the world is really important, you should just hire Beaconfire. We can do it for you. Our Online Campaigns and Marketing team will be happy to assist you.

This table compares the complete lists of sites supported between Ping and Hellotxt. Of course you might not have heard of 90% of these sites, but that’s because many of these are from countries that don’t have English as a native language. In the rest of the world, small but very important spheres of bloggers, micro bloggers, and social networkers are forming and you have a chance to get in the ground floor!

I will be honest with you. I didn’t know about Ping.FM, Hellotxt, TwitterFeed, or the list of sites above until Beaconfire started to work on pipelining the feed of published grants from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to their @mottfoundation Twitter account. If you are interested in learning more about how to use Twitter and other tools to market your organization, also check out a blog from a friend of mine. Jeremy Epstein publishes a blog by the name of “Never Stop Marketing”. He does follow his own advice, and is always marketing. Jeremy posts many updates every day and he’s the one who told me about Ping.FM.

The new world of the Internet is ever changing and Twitter is another tool which people are starting to use. People around the world are using other tools to do similar things. If you want to spread your message, you should look into all of the paths you can take to reach your prospective client, customer, constituent, or citizen. As I said before, use this knowledge wisely. With great power comes great responsibility.

Senators can now legally post YouTube videos on their Web sites, thanks to a long-awaited update to the chamber’s rules.

Until now, any Senator who embedded a YouTube video or linked to a Flickr album was in violation of outdated rules that required them to keep within the senate.gov domain. Some posted such links anyway, and few were reprimanded.

But last week, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee voted to allow Senators to use third-party sites.

This is pretty much indisputably a good thing. Not only does it allow Senators to bring their websites into the 21st century, but many of these tools foster interactions between citizens and their representatives in Washington. In addition, Congress’s ability to use technology is directly related to their ability to understand and regulate it wisely.

No movement yet on the House side, but hopefully we’ll see some changes there with the next Congress once they see how effectively their Senate colleagues make use of user-generated content tools.

In the meantime, I’d like to suggest that Senators celebrate their new freedom by embedding this video on their homepages: