This recap was originally posted on the TechSoup Canada blog.

By: Claire Buré, TechSoup Canada Volunteer 

If we compare the two phrases, “Hear John's story on our website” or “go to the website and check out our stats”, which of the two is more likely to encourage you to go to the organization's website? The first one, right? The most compelling stories are those that appeal to emotion: those that are told from the heart, rather than a fact sheet.

For this month's Net2 Think Tank, we asked you for your tips, tools, and suggestions for communicating online within a team. Many organizations have found ways to work seamlessly across the hall or across an ocean using online tools to facilitate their internal communication, but finding the right tools for your team takes effort. This round-up aims to help you to jump-start your creative juices and re-think the way you look at internal communications.

External communication practices have been transformed by the growth of the internet and in particular blogging, micro blogging, and other services like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. These online tools have created tremendious opportunities for people, organizations and companies to make information available to a world-wide audience, but what have they done to transform efforts to communicate within teams?

Share examples of how your group, organization, or company is using online tools to communicate internally!

Google 'launched' Google Wave about two weeks ago at the I/O Conference. It's continued to create quite a stir on the blogosphere, Twitter, and YouTube (2 million+ views!). Check out the 80 minute intro. video or read this TechCrunch article for an overview. 

Through Google Wave, Google seeks to change the way we communicate and collaborate online. I think it's worth pausing, though, to reflect on the Google Wave team's process around how they communicated and collaborated with the community to get us to this point. How might the Google Wave team have done things differently to better position themselves for world-changing success? And what are lessons we could learn for our world-changing projects?

I just want to introduce our IJCentral featured project and welcome any comments - I look forward to receiving comments or questions from N2Y4 conference participants.  You can find the project at: http://www.netsquared.org/projects/ijcentral

 Here is a trailer of The Reckoning, the documentary that will be driving the IJCentral project:

Our users can communicate with one another, which is great, but quite often as an administrator the need may arise for us to communicate with a user or users on our site. It may be to remind them about the web site or to inform active users about new changes to the site, which they may not have been made aware of.

This article is extracted from the "Drupal 6 Social Networking" book. In this article, you will learn:

Our first "real" Phoenix meeting had a decent turnout of 8 persons. As internal communication was one of the key areas which was highlighted discussion, Jaime Casap from Google's Phoenix office will be joining us in September to talk about Google Apps for nonprofits.

RSVP on the Netsquared Meetup site!

Location

Location

In a recent interview conducted by nonprofit blogging guru Marshall Kirkpatrick, marketing guru Seth Godin calls nonprofits "so so clueless" for not jumping on his Squidoo bandwagon. Squidoo.com is Seth's new Web service. For no charge, it allows anyone to create a Web page -- with links, reviews, photos, products for sale -- about any particular topic. But as Seth told Marshall, "Most non profits are so so clueless. My favorite example: more than a quarter of a million people have used Squidoo since December. Any idea how many non-profits have emailed me and asked to be listed as a charity or to get promotion? ZERO....It's not like I'm hard to find."