Beautiful video of why one woman loves engineering

Social Media tips from Social Media for Social Good webinar

Social Media for Social Good online seminar

Overview

On November 1, 2012, Heather Mansfield hosted an online seminar for her book, Social Media for Social Good: A How-to Guide for Nonprofits (available from many booksellers in print and electronic format).  Heather Mansfield can be considered an expert in the field of Social Media in the nonprofit arena as she maintains the "Nonprofit" profile across many different social media outlets such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.  Ms. Mansfield is also the owner of DIOSA Communications where she specializes in the providing online training for nonprofit organizations to improve their use of social media and mobile technologies. 

The topic for this free online seminar was to whet our appetites for the rest of the material in her 268 page book about using social media.  In addition to hitting the highlights of each chapter, Ms. Mansfield provided a comprehensive set of real world examples.  I was tweeting during the entire seminar (@devinedrive) and here are some of the takeaways and a few applications to support the concepts presented during the seminar.

Take-away Concepts

 

Website evaluation - How does your website stack up?

One of the most interesting discussions was regarding e-Newsletters.   Ms. Mansfield recommends that the subscribe to our e-Newsletter button is prominently displayed on every page of your website.  See additional recommendations with great examples on her blog.

In fact, it is a good idea to review your website with some industry leading nonprofit organizations.  One specific reason to view other excellent nonprofit organizations is to see how users travel from social media back to their main website.  Check each page and get a feel for the customer experience from Facebook or Twitter.  And don't be afraid to implement your own website enhancements based upon your research.

 

Storytelling with social media - Increase funding

I recently attended a Twitter event sponsored by American Express (see #amexleads) where nonprofit leaders discussed the challenges facing their specific organizations.  As the former International Executive Board President for Alpha Omega Epsilon, I had experience with many of challenges that all participating leaders had in common.  One of the biggest challenges is getting the purpose or mission of a nonprofit organization into the world.  For many nonprofits, their website is the main portal to engaging with potential and existing supporters.

During the conversation, Dustin S. Speakman (@DustinSSpeakman) discussed how his cause uses the stories of their national service members to get the story out.  In fact, take a look at the National Service In Action contest going on now.  Your members tell your story from a personal level and can be very powerful.

Once your supporter has reached your site, give them the opportunity to get involved!  Members want to help in more ways that just financial and with social media outlets there are many ways to do this.  If you set up a campaign through Twibbon, users are able to support their cause by modifying their Facebook and Twitter profiles.  In addition, Twibbon enables users to post "Donate Now" messaging to their Facebook page and post the cause to other social media outlets. Twibbon has both free and pay-for campaign services.

 

Looking towards the future - The need for Social Media Staff

Reasons to Hire a Social Media Manager - Establishing a positive relationship with customers is a time consuming process.  If it was fast and easy, everyone would be in love with every company.  A positive social media campaign should present the user with a consistent message regardless of how the customer engages.  This takes time, planning and staff to ensure that social media outlets are updated accordingly and in the manner that makes sense for their interface.  For example, you can't cross-post the contents of a blog article to Twitter.  Too many characters.  So, each social media interface needs to be cared for properly.

One of the attendees asked a question about how to break in to the social media field.  Ms. Mansfield recommended starting a portfolio of social media results.  A great way to start developing this portfolio is by getting familiar with the metric capabilities of Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media outlets.  Start a spreadsheet to track your contributions and monitor how those contributions perform over time.  Don't forget to take screenshots or have samples of your material for potential employers to review.  This is the basis of your portfolio.

Looking towards the future - Mobile technology applications

From my previous involvement with an online retailer, the subject of mobile traffic came up every holiday.  One of the leading sources for online data, the Internet Retailer website, showcases the past and projected mobile traffic.  According to Internet Retailer, 39.0% of internet traffic to Internet Retailer top 500 e-retailers will be coming from smartphones. 

This begs the question - Is your site mobile ready?  If you want to find out what any site looks like when viewed on a mobile device, test your site.  Also, check out the results of a report from The Chronicle of Philanthropy to see how other nonprofit organizations plan to expand their mobile technology capabilities.

One up and coming way to combine a personalized experience with mass text messaging is available through Slowinski Solutions.  The Context Sender allows the sender to customize an otherwise very general text message.  This is a great way to start a conversation between your organization and an individual.  Don't forget to direct them to your Donation page customized for viewing on a mobile device.

Conclusion

Interested in learning how nonprofits can leverage Twitter and Twitter apps, join Ms. Mansfield on November 6th for her next online seminar: Twitter and Twitter apps for Nonprofits.  And don't forget to support the author by purchasing Social Media for Social Good.

'Girls Who Code' Sets Sights On Teaching 1 Million Girls To Code

As reported in the Huffington Post, companies like Twitter, General Electric, eBay and Google held an 8 week course geared to garnering more interest from women in Computer Science.  The group, Girls Who Code will be expanding their scope from New York City to other cities in 2013.

Best of luck!

Join the conversation!

Join the conversation on Twitter hosted by the Center for Creative Leadership.  Tweet #amexleads to discuss the challenges facing non-profit organizations today!

Great free development tools for small businesses

 Small Business development tools

Working for a small company can have many challenges - one of which is affording tools to do jobs that you don't always make money on or for.  I find that oftentimes, small businesses resort to using Microsoft Word or PowerPoint to develop complex diagrams instead of applications like Visio.  I have found it very frustrating to develop any type of complex diagram using either of these applications as the ability to setup diagrams such as flowcharts or state machines is just not there.  (With Visio, these types of diagrams are a snap!)

Also, at small companies, people are oftentimes used to developing documentation within a vacuum.  This can mean that they use something that may have "fallen off the bus" or that they have purchased for their own home use.  The challenge her is that other developers may not have the same set of tools and therefore end up re-creating the images from scratch in their own chosen applications.  This wastes time and money and also decreases employee morale as we must reinvent the wheel again.

However, I have found two free applications that have helped me out greatly.  They are freely available on the web, so any of my fellow developers can also download and install them to pickup where I left off.

UML Diagrams

UMLet is a free, open-source UML diagram tool.  You can rapidly develop UML diagrams and modify colors, text, and features of the shapes.  The installation is flawless on a Windows 7, 64b processor and I have had no issues using it.  This is not a substitute for RationalRose or other complex UML tools, but it is free and very easy to use.  Drag and drop shapes onto the drawing area.  You can lasso shapes to move groups, zoom in and out, and move around the diagram. 

The UMLet drawings can be exported to image formats such as BMP, JPG, and PNG.  There are other export formats as well. 

Wireframe Generators

My current assignment is developing a Java-based GUI.  It's been awhile since I've done Java development but I do remember that GUIs are painful.  Not from a coding perspective but from an opinion perspective.  (You know what they say about opinions, right?)  I've found that presenting users with wireframes of the screens is a great way to gain buy-in early on in the project.  This reduces the churn of going through iteration after iteration of moving buttons around and changing fonts and colors.  Everyone is on the same page from the beginning.  Now, you can do wireframes with a pencil and paper however for a better hands-on experience, look to these two products to allow your customers to interact with the mock-ups and move through the GUI.

Pencil

Pencil is a Firefox plug in and is free.  Pencil provides you with several basic shape templates to give your wireframes different looks to them.  Pencil has a simple drag-and-drop interface allowing you to drag shapes and components onto the drawing surface.  You can customize components such as drop-down menus and tables to give the user the experience of looking at their GUI.

Pencil also has the ability to link pages.  This means that buttons, when "pressed", will take the user to a different page in the wireframe.  This gives the illusion of actually interacting with the GUI.  Linking pages is a fantastic way to start usability discussions at the beginning of the process, not at the end.

Balsamiq

Balsamiq is another wonderful wireframe generation tool.  Balsamiq offers several pricing options and includes a web-based version.  Balsamiq provides more shapes and templates than Pencil allowing you to generate a richer-looking GUI for your customer.  Balsamiq also provides the ability to link pages.

With Balsamiq and Pencil, you get what you pay for.  If you have a bit of a budget to spend on a wireframe tool, I would recommend Balsamiq.  There are more components provided to you which make GUIs much more realistic.  However, for the price of free, you can't beat Pencil.

Conclusion

Do you have other favorite tools that you use at your small business?  Either for development or for business purposes such as project management/tracking or tracking hours?  I'd love to hear what you use.

Prediciting your behaviours?

Recorded Future is a start-up company that monitors streams of data from such sources as Twitter, WordPress, websites, blogs, Government sites, blogs, and news outlets with the goal of predicting relationships into the future.  These relationships can be amongst people, companies and countries. Recorded Future takes the task out of managing the copious amount of data that is out there and makes it useful to people.   What is neat about Recorded Future, is that it is aware of keywords like dates,  times and locations and uses those keywords to piece together other bits of information. 

As discussed in the video from Democracy Now!, both Google and the CIA have backed funding for this  start-up company.  With so much of our information freely available out there for the taking, what is to stop any company from profiling you and predicting out your potential behaviours?

Also, think about the impact that future information would have on today's stock market.  Would the stock market still work the same if predictions on market (or governmental) stability were made known to everyone?  Would companies spring up that would attempt to counteract the future trends by pumping (false) contrary information into the ether?

How do you feel about your information being claimed by another company, evaluated and interpreted?  Are you okay with more targeted ads being sent your way for the car you will buy in the next month (with say 80% certainty)?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Free Education

Free online education from top Universities!

Many of these online courses require you to turn in homework and complete quizzes.  Has anyone taken a Coursera course?  If so, what did you think of it?


Here are a few courses on my short list

• Functional Programming Principles in Scala
• Networked Life
• Computing for Data Analysis
• Web Intelligence and Big Data (this is a huge growth industry!); and of course
• Social Network Analysis

If you've been following my reading list on LinkedIn, you will see a lot of books on community building and human networks.  I find the whole subject of how humans self-organize to be absolutely fascinating.  One book I strongly recommend on the subject is The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell, followed closely by Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler.

Happy Learning!

Release the Hounds!

Excellent Marine companions. Check out the video. While they may not be super fast or stealthy - the concept is there. All I can hear is my husband yelling at these AIs like he does the NPCs in his online games!
Joint project with DARPA and the U.S. Marines

Argonne National Labs receives funding for STEM outreach efforts

http://newscenter.iupui.edu/5754/Chicago-State-IUPUI-and-Argonne-get-25-million-for-regional-STEM-center-with-goal-of-increasing-minorities-in-science-careers