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Many groups need more media and member savvy before net2/ web 2.0 can be relevant

To take advantage of the oppportunities that blogs and socialnetworking offer, many nonprofits have to reach the point where they have broader definitions of constiutents, participants, members, the media, and donors, and a broader definition of participation. I'm not sure what percent of service-providing nonprofits perceive any incentive in increasing their investment in these areas, as the case for return on their investment isn't a clear one.

 What bridging examples are there of organizations that moved from being net2/ socialnetworking/blog/ and wiki ignorant to successfully embracing these and seeing powerful results? Cases of custom webapps and mashups are the ones that come first to my mind.

Comments

it's true!

Clear examples seem more important at this point than almost anything else. http://netsquared.org/casestudy is the link for more than 100 profiled organizations on the netsquared site who are employing web 2.0 type tools.

I would content that there is also a big increase in the usefulness of these tools as the sophistication of our use increases. For example, today I looked with someone at the blog search results for one word that was of interest to them vs. the results of a query made up of that word plus a phrase in quotes. It was clear that the more complex query was far more worth subscribing to by feed than the first - and it would be a mistake to look at the search results of a vague, one word query and say "I don't want to subscribe to search feeds, these results are worthless!"

I also share your concerns about a narrow understanding of stakeholders and decision makers coinciding with a narrow understanding of interests (financial) - I'll be curious to see where this all goes. It may be that those who "do" become so much more agile than those who "don't" that there will emerge competitive advantages beyond largess and the image of propriety.

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