This blog has a Creative Commons license. Why? Because I want people to know that I expect them to share things they find interesting, or to help further the conversation but that in sharing, others need to keep the content free, too. Because Creative Commons licenses help creators, sharers, and readers enjoy online content respectfully.  So, when I saw that Creative Commons released a version of the licensing and an application for Facebook, I had to check it out!

“CC licenses enable anyone to specify to the public how they want their work to be used. If you’re a photographer, you might be happy to let someone use your photos so long as they give you credit. CC licenses make it easier to be clear about how you want your content used.

The Creative Commons License application allows users to choose one of the six Creative Commons licenses to apply to the content they upload to Facebook.”

Why use Creative Commons in Facebook?

You may be licensing your blog posts or website content under a CC license, like I do (you can see the license information in the right hand column).  Maybe you use Flickr and share your photos there under a CC license as well.  Why, because you want others to know they can share or post your cool photos so long as they give attribution (or any other stipulated criteria you’ve set via the licensing options).

Facebook has a great deal of content you are creating, uploading, posting, and sharing.  Why not license that as well so that your Flickr photos and your Facebook photos are both included. So that your blog posts and your status messages are both licensed.

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You’ve started using Twitter to find new supporters. But now you’re having a tough time managing the “stream.”

Fortunately, there are many applications (both desktop and web-based) to help you organize your followers and conversations on Twitter.

One such tool is Seesmic.

Below are three videos I created for folks who want to learn how to use Seesmic.

Video 1

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The 6th annual Craigslist Foundation’s Nonprofit Boot Camp takes place June 20 in Berkeley, CA. The day includes workshops, one-on-one coaching sessions, and keynotes by Arianna Huffington, Randi Zuckerberg and Craig Newmark.

For years, I’ve been wanting to attend and this year, finally, I am!  And, I’m leading a workshop on social media strategy.  My colleagues Britt Bravo and Eric Leland are also facilitating a workshop about getting started with social media and Peter Deitz is talking about future technology.  The content is not all social media.  Organized around the theme “connect, motivate and inspire greater community impact,” you will find a schedule and speakers with expertise on evaluation, governance, management, strategic planning and more!  There is also ample time for networking.

You can read the full description here and check out the schedule and speakers.  The registration is only $75 and you sign up to attend here.

See you there!

On June 19-20, 2009, I’ll be at New York University’s School of Law attending the Open Video Conference. To my surprise and delight, this is turning out to be quite a big event.

Socialbrite readers get 15 percent the registration fee (regularly $75 for individuals and nonprofits and $200 for companies). The event will be held June 19-20 at NYU.

The open source landscape has come quite a long way in the past few years, and its importance to the media landscape can hardly be overestimated, said Shay David — co-founder and CTO of Kaltura and a fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project — by phone as he sped to the airport for yet another trip abroad.

“If you want an open structure of media to guarantee that the future of media is not proprietary and locked down, then open is the only way to go,” he said. “If we care about democratized media, where citizens in their living rooms can access programming from more than just three or four media conglomerates, then we should care about open video.”

But David’s warning is not a call to arms against entrenched corporate interests. “Millions of lines of code have been written in the open video world without a lot of success,” he acknowledged.

Rather, it’s a call for reasoned partnerships: public and private, new and old, for-profit and nonprofit. We need to think beyond licenses and consider how to build real businesses that are built on open and democratic principles — and translate that into real economic value. In short, he argues that open video is not just about serving the interests of users. Open video is good for business, too.

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Foundation Center: philanthropy info galore from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

If you’ve spent some time in the world of nonprofit philanthropy, you’ve no doubt heard of the Foundation Center. The venerable organization, which has been around for more than 50 years, is a nonprofit library and learning center that provides information about U.S. philanthropy and helps organizations and individuals learn how to apply for grants through a rich foundation database.

Best of all, it’s free — just like a public library.

At the recent Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC), I ran into Sarah Jo Neubauer, assistant librarian at the center’s San Francisco Library, who provided a brief overview of the center’s offerings.

You can find out how to write a grant proposal to any of the 92,000 profiled foundations. If you’re a student, you can learn how and where to apply for financial aid. (This is, after all, Education Month.)

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Mobile advocacy efforts are just beginning around the world.  What are we learning from these emergent campaigns what works and what does not in using mobile phones to advance a cause or an issue?

Of course, we think that advocacy organizations should start to pay serious attention to using mobiles in their work. There is increasing evidence that mobile social marketing works in increasing brand awareness and moving people to actions. It is also becming an increasingly effective way to engage users and constituents. Here are a few pointers from what we have learned to date.

1. What’s happening in the mobile (social) marketing market that advocacy organizations should pay attention to?

• Over 84 percent of Americans have cell phones, according to the CTIA, an industry group. Data shows that the majority of users carry their mobiles around for up to 18 hours/day. In fact the mobile, keys, and wallets are the three things most adults will not leave the house without.
• Sms/texting is growing by leaps and bounds. More than 48 billion text messages were sent in the month of December 2007, an average 1.6 billion messages per day. The rate of text messaging represented a 157 percent increase over December 2006 texting. (according to M:Metrics data)
• Mobile marketers are salivating, with polls, contests, coupons, and even mobi-sodes, short sms serial stories hitting the commercial market. Pepsi, Ford, Toyota, Burger King all have mobile campaigns, and more and more marketers are allocating hard dollars to “mobile marketing” budgets.
• Visa announced its mobile payment platform, allowing cardholders to use their mobile phones to make purchases or conduct other transactions by tapping them against readers. Think ‘just in time’ fundraising.

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Guest post by Jed Alpert
Founder, Mobile Commons

In this guide, we’ll introduce you to the world of mobile activism and show you how you can take your organization mobile. (You can also download and print out the guide as a 16-page Word doc from Archive.org.)

Mobile is a complex ecosystem, and it includes:

• Telecom carriers: All mobile traffic is routed through telecom providers like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T.

• Handset manufacturers: A wide variety of companies manufacture mobile devices, from Apple’s iPhone to boutique brands you haven’t heard of yet.

• The Internet: A small number of mobile  hones (about 5%) have web capability – users can check email and surf the web, though the experience can be uneven at times.

• Application providers: Mobile application providers allow you to create and manage your mobile programs, often from a web-based application.

We’ll mention a few pertinent facts about each of these areas, but we’ll focus mostly on application providers; good providers will serve as a one-stop shop, so you won’t have to deal with any complexity.

First, though, a short introduction to the various forms mobile programs can take.

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Fred Krupp is the CEO of the Environmental Defense Fund

Recently, BusinessWeek published a slideshow of CEO’s who use Twitter, noting the dramatic rise of CEO’s who use Twitter to clue customers in on new services, help them with questions about their products, and generally get a little bit personal with customers, business associates, and the public.

There are some other benefits to having your nonprofit’s CEO be on Twitter, these might include:

• Source of news
• Brand Building
• Focus Group/Research
• Networking Tool
• Monitoring
• Drive Traffic to web site
• Humanizing your communications

Of course, if your CEO is going to Twitter, they have to be keep a consistent schedule and be authentic.    There’s been a bit of debate about celebrity Twitter users who have “ghost” twitterers or simply people helping them tweet.

I did a brief scan to see if there any nonprofit chief executives who Twitter. Here’s a few whom I found:

1. @carlPope is the executive director of the Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots environnmental group.  His tweets are about his organization’s work and retweeting others messages.  Take for example

RT @maryannehitt http://twitpic.com/5n4sq – Re-posting great Seattle rally photo by Sierra Club’s Dan Ritzman #nocoal #epacaa

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