Twitter announced on August 13th that they will be integrating an analytics tool into the popular micro-blogging site. Organizations doing outreach on Twitter now have much more information about how those efforts are paying off.

From http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3810911/Daily+Mobile+Internet+Use+Doubles.htm

"The number of people using mobile devices to access news and information on the Internet more than doubled in the past year, according to figures released by market firm ComScore this week.

Young males are the most avid users of mobile news and information, according to Comscor (NASDAQ: SCOR), with half of 18-to 34-year-old males engaging in the activity. The mobile Internet is also quite popular among females in the 18 to 24-year-old demographic. The report covered January 2008 to January 2009."

I was talking to someone about the growing importance of Facebook to fundraising, but was pulled up short by the following comment:

But Facebook users are all 20-somethings. Our supporters are all in their 40s and 50s. We have an older audience - they wouldn't know how to use Facebook!

Not true, according to the latest stats. Facebook isn't just grabbing the youth demographic, it's gobbling up the baby boomers as well.  Find out where your donors are hanging out...

I've been asked to come up with ROI metrics for a grant proposal that includes a major long-haul, long-view social-web initiative, involving:

• Enterprise-wide blogging program for staff policy experts
• Enterprise-wide initiative to train staff in use of social-networking tools of various kinds -- to bring staff online in a robust way, so that we are able to carry on many more simultaneous, varied conversations, build tighter relationships with constituents, and participate broadly in the live web.
• effort to establish beachheads in external social-web communities -- in Flickr, MySpace, Upcoming.org, Digg.com, YouTube, LinkedIn, and so on. Focus would be not so much on putting institutional or campaign-related profiles in these contexts, as getting staff -- actual human beings, instead of a billboard -- participating in these communities.
• Major effort to enlist constituents as primary messengers -- give them widgets, blogs, content-distribution tools, and so on, let them know their efforts to spread the word and lend us whatever they have to give -- time, creativity, whatever -- is critical to advancing my organization's mission.

What we really want to do is create passionate users -- nurture and develop "constituent evangelists."