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Privacy Settings on Facebook

An excellent post from mashable.com on how to use lists to share posts with a targeted group of "friends" on Facebook.

Keeping Your Facebook Updates Private

Social Bookmarking & StumbleUpon

We "StumbledUpon" this how-to guide from SocialMedia Examiner. If you are wondering what the heck social bookmarking is or are interested in learning more about how to use it effectively, this post is for you.

How to Use StumbleUpon: Your Comprehensive Guide

Malcolm Gladwell has created something of a firestorm with his piece in the October 4 New Yorker, Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

Read it here http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=1

For a thoughtful review of the controversy, see the UK Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/03/malcolm-gladwell-twitter-doesnt-work

Flickr! Flickr! Flickr!

The photo sharing site, Flickr, provides organizations with a great platform to tell their story with images. With a Flickr account, individuals can showcase and chronicle their organization’s work through their own photography. It’s also a great way to organize your digital library.

For more on how to use Flickr, check out the site's help section, "How to Get the Most Out of Flickr." Another good resource is webdesigner depot's "Mastering Flickr: A Practice Guide."

The New Facebook Groups

Earlier in the month, there was a lot of talk about Facebook's newly revamped "groups" feature. Social Media Today's recent post, "10 Tips for Managing the New Facebook Groups," has some great advice on the "new and improved" Facebook Groups.

Animoto: The End of Slideshows

Animoto is a web application that produces videos from user-selected photos, video clips and music. It turns images, video clips and music into fairly sophisticated videos. Users can create 30-second videos at no-cost, longer videos for $3 each, or pay $30 a year for unlimited use. Educators and nonprofits can apply for free all-access passes to the web service.

Animoto is on the web at http://animoto.com/.

Here's a video aptly titled "MTA Activists Rock!" created on Animoto.

Thinking of Blogging?

If you are thinking of entering the blogosphere but have concerns about keeping up with it, check out "10 Blog Content Ideas for Nonprofit Organizations" by Heather Mansfield of Nonprofit Tech 2.0. Mansfield offers some great suggestions for generating new content. She also maintains that blogging doesn't require a daily commitment. According to Mansfield, it's okay to post only once a week.

Activate Your YouTube Viewers

Materials produced for the upcoming Nonprofit Technology Network conference;

http://www.nten.org/blog/2010/03/23/activating-your-youtube-audience-recording-and-links

Twitter account hacked? Here's how to clean up.

Over the past few days, far too many tweeps have found their account "compromised" when they clicked on malicious DM (Direct Message). The bad DMs were a phishing scheme that tricked the account holders into logging in to Twitter, thereby exposing their password. The account is then used to send out more spam, some of a highly embarrassing nature.

Here's instructions on how to recover from the official Twitter Help page.

Social Media Tools -- Tweetdeck, etc.

Once you have got the hang of Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, you might want to take advantage of one or some of the many free desktop or online programs that will help keep you organized.

Here is a short list of some options:

Tweetdeck, for example, is a browser that allows you to view and update Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace in real time in one convenient dashboard.

Hootsuite is an online service that allows you to schedule tweets and post them at a later time and/or date.

Seesmic is another browser that allows you to follow Twitter and Facebook in one central place on your desktop.

For more on social media tools, check out this recent post by Jay Baer at his blog, Convince and Convert, on the many options available right now.

Alas, our list of tools doesn't include smart phone applications. We'll save that subject for another day.

Social Media Count