It is my turn to host the Nonprofit Blog Carnival, so I’ve chosen one of my favorite topics, Social Media.  I’m a big fan of Social Media for nonprofits because I believe that it can radically improve the efficiency and ROI of the marketing program.  True, the direct ROI of Social isn’t as measurable as a Pay Per Click ad, but remember that the investment you make in direct online channels scales up linearly with budget and often has diminishing returns.  Social Media scales with the size of a growing community. It feeds itself and, done right, it has compounding returns.  The Wild Apricot Blog provides more rationale this week in Making the Case for Social Media Marketing .

What drives Social Media success?  Think Outside the Site from The Connection Café does a nice job of setting out a fundamental truth that drives effective social media engagement: It’s not about your Web site.  Getting past “marketer-think” (i.e., “my goal is to drive people to my Web site so that I can talk to them about what is important to me”) is critical.  Marketers must leave the comfort of their own home (The Web Site) and venture out into the communities of others to have conversations that go beyond “one to many” pitches for donations.

One of the interesting places to venture out to is Twitter.  If you don’t *get* Twitter, read Three of the Latest Reasons Why I Love Twitter from Social Butterfly for a good overview and some useful tips.

Harold Jarche writes this week about using Social as a community building tool (and demonstrates that necessity is often the mother of Social Media invention.)  For another good example on how to use Social, take a look at Cox Communications’ Kudzu.com fundraiser, featured this week on The Cause Related Marketing Blog (I love what Cox has done with this.  It is a great example of taking the time to understand what your community wants and how to incentivize them to become content creators.) 

Love Without Boundaries, the winners of the Facebook Causes Giving Challenge also provides an interesting case study on Social.  Frogleap has a nice interview with the folks at LWB on how they did it.

Rachel Happe’s The Struggle to Measure Social Media Effectiveness sets out some of the thorny issues about Social Media measurement.  Attempting to apply old models to things that are new and hard to understand is only human nature.  In my opinion, this is what is happening with attempts to measure Social Media.  Rachel’s post does a nice job of reminding us that the things we already know how to measure are not the things that provide true insight when it comes to Social Media.

Happy reading!  Remember that only the connected will survive…

Keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, no matter which blog is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival feed.