I’m giving a presentation this Friday to a group of executive directors who are members of the Maine Association of Nonprofits. The topic is ‘developing a communications plan for nonprofit organizations.’ I’ve been working on a handout and a PowerPoint presention and thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.

In the most basic terms, when developing a communications plan, there are four things to consider.

1. The recipient of the message.

2. The sender of the message.

3. The message.

4. The tools used to send the message. Continue Reading »

I have started receiving invitations by email to join a social networking site called Naymz. I have not yet joined, as I already do LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace, although I am not too active on MySpace and I feel guilty about it. I am wondering what people think of Naymz, and what are the pros and cons of using it versus the other social networking sites? How is it different, better, or worse than LinkedIn?

I hate to ignore a good invitation to a network, as I hate ignoring an invitation to a party! So please let me know if I am missing something good, interesting, or valuable.

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I chastised a client yesterday for not having posted a blog entry since May 12th on a blog that we created for his organization. I am not going to embarrass this client by linking to his blog in this post.

My message to the client was that you are better off not having a blog at all than having one that lies dormant for two months. This particular client went crazy when the blog first went live, and created six posts on the first day. He would have been better off saving these posts and putting up just one a week over the course of six weeks. Continue Reading »

I just came upon a very interesting blog post from Paul Coyne about ten objections to social media and how you (as a professional communicator) can respond to them.

Check it out.

Basically Paul is telling us that the train is leaving the station and you can either hop on or watch everyone else get on board and leave you behind. Wait for me!  I’m coming! 

http://intouch.emeraldinsight.com/paulcoyne/weblog/17042.html

On May 24th, I wrote a post about helping a client locate structural engineers through the use of online advertising and social media as opposed to simply placing ads in newspapers’ classified sections. We posted ads on Craigslist, jobsinme.com, jobsinmaine.com, linkedin.com. We also encouraged our client to get on linkedin and increase his network. Continue Reading »

Happy Fourth of July!  Thank God for Independence.

That’s it for today. It’s too nice outside to spend time on the computer over the holiday weekend. I’m at the lake this weekend and the weather is gorgeous.

I am now reading Seth Godin’s book “Meatball Sundae: is your marketing out of sync?”

The premise of the book is that you can’t just apply new social marketing techniques to old products. He compares using new marketing for old products to putting whipped cream and a cherry on top of meatballs. Yuk. Continue Reading »