This is Richard Landry, reporting live from the NetSquared Conference. I am covering the session entitled, “Investing in Social Networks,” led by Peter Campbell, director of Information Technology for Earthjustice (“Because the earth needs a good lawyer”).

Live blogging is a practice of careful listening, and I have a long way to go in that area! So if you see something that I misunderstood or misreported, please post a comment/correction.

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Peter led a highly interactive session, with a lot of the best ideas coming from interaction between him and the conference attendees. He started by talking about his role as the IT director for Earthjustice—what did that title mean? To him, the key skill he feels an IT director needs to have is the ability to assess realistically what the tech landscape is like right now, and then to look beyond that to breaking trends and see what they mean.

For example, social networking is intriguing, and everybody seems to want to jump on it by getting a Facebook application up and running. But the reality is that we have had CRM systems for managing contacts and donors for years. So the underlying question is how social networks complement that proven technology—if at all. Put another way: If, instead of building that Facebook application, you used that same time and energy to work on a few major donors, how much more money might you have brought in for your organization?

Rather than Facebook, an intriguing new application with entirely new capabilities is Twitter—not to deploy as a fundraising tool, but instead as a new way to engage constituents in your network. It is appealing because it brings new capabilities to the table (for action alerts, for example); it has a low startup cost compared to Facebook; and it is hooked into Google, Friendfeed, and...Facebook.

Discussion

This is where things got interesting. The attendees asked most of the questions, and provided most of the answers, too!

Q: Where will we be in five years? Who thinks we will still be concerned with Facebook and MySpace?
A: Destinations, per se, will go away. Instead of going to the web, the web will come to us.

Q: If you have a strategy that could involve the social web, how do you get started?
A: Most of the challenges are organizational, not technological. People have to get over fear of the unknown, and they have to be willing to take some risks and give up some control.

Some common challenges:

--Ownership of data (e.g., customer lists)
--Message control (fear of what constituents might say on your site)
--Time crunch (too busy to try to innovate)
--Fear to take a leap of faith and just try it
--Getting discouraged over a lack of immediate results (no learning culture; inability to see the learning itself as a result)
--Embarrassment over not knowing; being afraid to ask questions

Several people offered solutions to these challenges:

--Provide one-on-one training to key decisionmakers, so they can increase their literacy without feeling inadequate in front of their peers
--Hire a college intern to try some small-scale experiments, and then showcase them to the board and staff
--Get a small group of committed staff members together to discuss and try new technology, and let the group together pick a project and set of tools to introduce to the larger organization.

Finally, some resources:

The Overbrook Foundation released a report last year on the challenges that nonprofits face in embracing Web 2.0. This is a good discussion piece to introduce into your organization.

Dreamfish, a new social networking platform for nonprofits and social enterprises, is in private beta now and would be interested in working with the NetSquared community. For further information, contact CEO Tiffany von Emmel.

A great session! Thanks Peter, and thanks everyone!