Iran in re-Tweet

Allah - you are the creator of all and all must return to you - Allah Akbar - #Iranelection Sea of Green
about 12 hours ago from web

thank you ppls 4 supporting Sea of Green - pls remember always our martyrs - Allah Akbar - Allah Akbar - Allah Akbar #Iranelection
about 12 hours ago from web

we must go - dont know when we can get internet - they take 1 of us, they will torture and get names - now we must move fast - #Iranelection
about 12 hours ago from web

Everybody is under arrest & cant move - Mousavi - Karroubi even rumour Khatami is in house guard - #Iranelection -
about 12 hours ago from web

they pull away the dead into trucks - like factory - no human can do this - we beg Allah for save us - #Iranelection
about 12 hours ago from web

Lalezar Sq is same as Baharestan - unbelevable - ppls murdered everywhere - #Iranelection about 12 hours ago from web

they catch ppl with mobile - so many killed today - so many injured - Allah Akbar - they take one of us - #Iranelection
about 12 hours ago from web

in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher - Allah Akbar - #Iranelection RT RT RT
about 12 hours ago from web

reports of street fighting in Vanak Sq, Tajrish sq, Azadi Sq - now - #Iranelection - Sea of Green - Allah Akbar
about 12 hours ago from web

rumour they are tracking high use of phone lines to find internet users - must move from here now - #Iranelection
about 12 hours ago from web

phone line was cut and we lost internet - #Iranelection - getting more difficult to log into net - #Iranelection
about 12 hours ago from web

all shops was closed - nowhere to go - they follow ppls with helicopters - smoke and fire is everywhere #Iranelection
about 13 hours ago from web

ppl run into alleys and militia standing there waiting - from 2 sides they attack ppl in middle of alleys #Iranelection
about 14 hours ago from web

so many ppl arrested - young & old - they take ppl away - #Iranelection - we lose our group
about 14 hours ago from web

saw 7/8 militia beating one woman with baton on ground - she had no defense nothing - #Iranelection sure that she is dead
about 14 hours ago from web

they were waiting for us - they all have guns and riot uniforms - it was like a mouse trap - ppl being shot like animals #Iranelection
about 14 hours ago from web

I see many ppl with broken arms/legs/heads - blood everywhere - pepper gas like war - #Iranelection
about 14 hours ago from web

just in from Baharestan Sq - situation today is terrible - they beat the ppls like animals - #Iranelection RT RT RT
about 14 hours ago from web

Larijani pressing for Mousavi to be given airtime on IRIB to discuss elections #Iranelection RT RT RT - tahlilerooz.ir
2:15 PM Jun 23rd from web

Does your organization have a whammy bar?

"Can it have a whammy bar?", The Harmonix (Guitar Hero) guys asked.
"Why, What would a whammy bar do?" the Huangs (investors) responded.
"We don't know yet, but it has to have a whammy bar", the Harmonix guys responded. "Because whammy bars are cool."

Does your organization have a whammy bar?

Guitar players get this allusion right away. For the non-musician, a "whammy bar" or tremolo arm, is the lever on a guitar bridge that allows the player to raise or lower the instrument pitch by pulling or pushing the bar while the notes are still fretted on the neck of the guitar. Jimi Hendrix is famous for his dive bomb and sky-high whammy bar use. And yes, whammy bars are cool.

What's cool about your organization?

I'll confess that I don't know what an organizational whammy bar looks like. It might be something Web 2.0 -- a Facebook page, a velvet rope social network, #yourconference @Twitter. It could also be a tool, a jobs board, photo sharing, geo-mapping, or a wiki. Whammy bars don't have to be digital. It could be something really cool that you do at your annual meeting that attendees talk about afterwards.

Whammy bars are about leverage and the fun you get from applying, expressing yourself, and being surprised and delighted with the result. What's your organizational whammy bar? I'd like to hear about your success stories.

secure communications for digital activists

"It is no myth that repressive regimes are becoming increasingly more savvy in their ability to effectively employ sophisticated filtering, censoring, monitoring technologies (often courtesy of American companies like Cisco) to crack down on resistance movements. In other words, political activists need to realize that their regimes are becoming smarter and more effective, not dumber and hardly clueless"
Read the rest to Patrick Meier's excellent article article How To Communicate Securely in Repressive Environments.

Twitterfall #iranelection

#iranelection, is amazing, breathtaking, not to be missed. Feed @.5 sec can't keep up. Cached tweets are at 700 in 4 minutes.

"change yr Twitter settings to show GMT +03:30 Tehran as your timezone & change home city to Tehran; confuse Iranian censors"

"Don't RT any more request to change location and time zones to #tehran It may confuse the protesters as well , enough already STOP !"

FreePersians Proxy list here: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx LET INFO OUT OF IRAN xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - IN FARSI #IranElection #iran99 #gr88 #tehran HAIL XENU! RT!

"Don't RT proxy lists!"

Ed. comment--this is one disorganized, messy revolution.

Should you hire an SEO consultant?

Read the Google SEO Starter Guide. If you get tired or confused, then you need to hire someone. If it makes sense, but you are thinking it will be a lot of work that you don't have time for, then hire someone. If you think you can do it yourself, then go for it! Either way this is a must read.

Engaging Your Audience --Tips From Huffington Post

A worthwhile video from WebProNews offers some tips on engaging your audience with social media techniques.

Huffington Post Shares Ways to Get an Audience Engaged

WebProNews had a few words with Huffington Post Chief Revenue Officer James Smith recently, and talked a little bit about what makes the social news site so popular. Why do you think the Huffington Post is so popular? The site logs over one million comments per month! Among the tips:
- polls
- images
- most popular stats (showing popular news stories/ how many comments)

Free, Fast, and Hot: Measuring Your Web and Social Media Footprint

Here is a list of free and paid tools from Dan Thornton for tracking Digital Marketing, with a particular focus on Social Media Marketing. Most of the standards are here. Of course, I'm a big fan of Google Analytics. Google insights for search is great as well. Try typing in keywords relevant to your association's core business.

A new one for me from Dan's page is Addict-o-matic. Tremedously fun. Enter your association name or acronym and see what pops up. How Sociable even gives you a brand metric. Free, fast and hot.

Leveraging Twitter and Other Social Media

Twitter is still the hot topic among association social media followers. The discussion is moving beyond "Is it good for anything?" to discussion of how to use it. I've been a Twitter user for a couple of weeks now. My Twitter feed updates to this blog and to several other sites. I have a couple of followers. Add Tweeting to my obligations.

I came across a really nice presentation by Shaun Dakin entitled Issue Advocacy Using Social and Traditional Media - from Twitter to MSNBC in 24 Hours that I recommend. He talks about how he used Twitter in concert with other social media to establish his own authority on a topic, create buzz, and build a network around his issue.

Upshot is, you can use Twitter in combination with other social media to flood the search hive-mind for your 15 minutes. But it is hard work.. Remember the good old days when all you had to do was load a page with invisible keywords to score a page 1 search return. :<)

Kidding aside, Shaun has some good, practical advice here along with other case studies of Twitter use by companies and organizations. He also provides info on some useful tools like Twitter search and Tweetdeck and others. I won't list them all. If you are interested in how your assocaiation can use Twitter in combination with social and other media, Shaun's presentation is worth your time.

Association Twitter

Twitter is a hot topic on the ASAE Listservs. Everyone is trying to figure out how to use it. So far, it seems pretty lame if it isn't tied to a real time event.

That may change.

I regularly ask my 20-year-old son about social media. His group has yet to embrace Twitter. They are still Facebook, all the time. The Facebook chat function is powerful and familiar. In a few years, they will all have 3G phones and Twitter may be the portal for updating their blogs, Facebook, etc.

Always the explorer, I've put a Twitter feed on this blog. It simultaneously updates my Facebook status.

Guess what? Now I need 2 Twitter accounts (as if I need 1). Apparently, lots of other people need more than one Twitter account. Here's a great article on the Twitterrati blog about tools to deal with this problem. By tomorrow, I'll be a SplitTweet user.

1 thing associations can learn from Facebook

Today Facebook asked me “What’s on your mind?” That question seems a bit confrontational. Why should I tell you?

OK, what’s on my mind is the topic of associations and online ad-hoc communities. I’m referring to online social media spaces that allow anyone to create their own community. Take Facebook Will Be Forced to Shutdown in 7 Days! Join and Save it! For example. An ad-hoc community on Facebook with 1,280,653 members See All to protest the new Facebook interface. By my count this is an ad-hoc group that has formed in less than a week to now comprise almost 1% of Facebook users. It will be interesting to see what happens next, especially in light of their recent change in TOS debacle. The TOS change spawned a similar user backlash and forced a clarification and return to the prior terms which said you owned your content. Facebook’s change to the TOS said Facebook had rights to your content forever, for whatever purpose, and even after you left Facebook. This was either a clumsily executed naked rights grab or the result of incompetent legal staff. We’ll never know which.

The interesting point here for associations is the ad-hoc community bit. Associations are fundamentally about community. Most associations offer some type of online community (community of practice, listserv, or more advanced social media space). However, in my experience, very few allow members the opportunity to create their own ad-hoc communities or interest groups within the association online environment. They typically offer a few communities based on membership interest areas. Creation of new communities is locked down and at the association’s discretion. This flows from the old association mother-ship model of top-down, controlled information flow.

What if an association allowed members to create their own ad-hoc communities? I posit:
* The number of communities would increase dramatically.
* Member to member connections would strengthen.
* The association would get advance info on odd topics of interest and trends. The edges are where all the interesting stuff happens.
* Communities of dissent would form.

That would't be all bad.