NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoup.org - promotion

Get 20% Off Your Purchase of Mobilizing Generation 2.0

Britt Bravo — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:23:46 -0400

Is your organization trying to figure out how to use Web 2.0 tools to work with young people? Ben Rigby of Mobile Voter, and the folks from Rock the Vote have authored a new book, Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth, that could be just what you need!

In an interview with Ben on the Net2 Blog and Net2 Podcast, Rigby talks about Mobilizing Generation 2.0:

"It's about how nonprofits and political campaigns are using Web 2.0 tech to engage young people in civic life and politics. There are seven main chapters. Myself and my research teams looked into blogging, social networking, video and photo sharing, mobile phones, wikis, maps, and virtual worlds. In each of these areas we investigated how the software was being used by organizations to accomplish their mission-related objectives.
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Incentivizing viral promotion: an interview with vendor Peter Caputa

marshallkirkpatrick — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:19:10 -0400

Peter Caputa IV is the founder of WizSpark, an events organizing and promotion company based in Westborough, MA. He also writes a savvy blog about Web 2.0 style promotion called PC4Media. In the following interview Peter and I discussed the use of blogs, MySpace, tracking technology and incentives to promote events. WizSpark does some work with nonprofits, helping with a recent walk to raise money for cancer research, for example.

My principles get a little rankled by some of Peter's ideas, but maybe I'm just uptight. In a world desperate for drastic change - agents of change should consider all possible options. At the very least, I hope you will find this interview to be an interesting look inside the mind of an intelligent specimen, a trail blazer, of a type of vendor ready to burst upon the scene: the social media fueled organizer/promoter. I appreciate Peter taking the time to answer my questions.

YouTube for political candidates

marshallkirkpatrick — Wed, 10 May 2006 17:37:05 -0400

The video sharing service YouTube is everywhere. After showing almost a million people the Colbert Bush roast before C-Span demanded they remove the video from their site, this week the company announced they would be accepting video uploads from cell phones and other mobile devices. Bloglines announced today that they would be adding flash-support so you can watch things like YouTube videos directly in your feed reader. I know there are critiques of YouTube and alternatives to it - but it's got a whole lot of momentum right now.

But this is the coolest YouTube news I've seen so far today. A video like this can be spread by clicking on the YouTube logo on the bottom right, then copying the embed code from the site onto your web page of choice. This has a lot of potential.

This via Jason Calacanis of AOL.

Word of Blog

Britt Bravo — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 11:37:36 -0400

We've got one of our snazzy badges up on Word of Blog, a web site that helps organizations promote their work by hosting downloadable badges and their HTML code, for FREE!

So, nonprofits and social change organizers, submit your badges, and bloggers, raise awareness about an issue you care about by posting a badge on your site.

We, the clueless

Celeste W of studio 501c — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 01:53:31 -0500

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."

Calendering the Social Web: an interview with Leonard Lin of Upcoming.org

marshallkirkpatrick — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 19:54:45 -0500

Leonard Lin is one of the co-founders of Upcoming.org, a popular social calendering service recently acquired by Yahoo. Upcoming takes event planning, promotion and attendance to the next level by supporting comments, groups, tags, RSS and much more. It makes several parts of events management easier and more efficient by utilizing new, social technologies.

I got to sit down with Leonard at the South by South West conference and we had a great talk about Upcoming and the future of web services and applications.

On appropriate communication for promotion: an interview with Seth Godin

marshallkirkpatrick — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 18:55:54 -0500

Seth Godin is the author of 7 best-selling books on marketing, web design, communications and more. Called "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age" by Business Week, Godin also writes a blog that's one of the most widely read online.

One of Godin's projects is Squidoo, a highly usable and dyanmic service for sharing knowledge on any topic.