Execution trumps strategy, according to Rachel Tipograph, social media director for the Gap. She was a very wise speaker on the “how” of actually getting things done in large organizations. Creating meaningful experiences online is more important than endless rounds of strategy and planning. As I listened to her speak at What’s Next DC, I watched heads bobbing in agreement around the room.

Execution > Strategy. Which is how I feel about conferences devoted to social media. How can you develop the perfect social media strategy in an ever-changing environment, especially when success is determined by the audience? It’s better to dive in, create something, and see what works.

I was at What’s Next DC thanks to my own bit of execution – I made a pithy comment on the importance of storytelling on GovLoop and won a free ticket to this conference on digital marketing.

What’s Next DC was relentlessly focused on execution, on new media marketing efforts that worked as told by the people who created them. There were no belabored lectures on the media landscape illustrated by grainy slides filled with biz speak jargon. Instead, real practitioners in the field told their stories, warts and all.

How Dunkin Donuts does it.

One of my favorite speakers was Jessica Gioglio from Dunkin Donuts. She made the point that Dunkin Donuts was a brand owned by the fans. People feel passionate about the donut-maker and her job was to provide them the tools to express that passion. They have a huge presence on Facebook, where they promote a “fan of the week” and run lots of Dunkin “DD” puns.

And when Dunkin screws up, she’s going to hear about it, even if it’s a local franchise having a typo in their signage. You have to respond quickly and personally to every concern.

Sabrina Caluori from HBO is not the kind of speaker you’d typically find at a conference in DC. She shared the successes and failures of HBO’s social media efforts. They originally tried a tweet-chat with one of the stars of True Blood. As hundreds of questions poured in, it was quickly clear that this wasn’t going to work. That led to the development of HBO Connect, a “digital water cooler” for fans to discuss their favorite shows and communicate with talent.

I have a passionate, vested interest in the Washington Post. I’ve read the paper daily for decades. Over the past couple years, I’ve watched as the Post web site became virtually unusable, due to a clunky content management system and the integration of every annoying web gadget out there.

Sadly, social media is just part of the clutter. Katharine Zaleski from the Washington Post discussed some of these “advancements”. Coming from the Huffington Post, she brought a relentless focus on metrics and daily measurement of news performance. And she rolled out a couple of dubious products. Mention Machine is super annoying. It’s a little bar that appears at the bottom of the browser, impinging upon the story that you’re reading, and showing the number of Twitter mentions various candidates have received. Doesn’t the Washington Post understand that we just want to read an article? Isn’t that what newspapers are for?

Another deleterious gee-whiz gimmick is the Washington Post Social Reader. I don’t want to install another annoying Facebook app just to read stories that my friends find interesting. Why do you have to reinvent the URL?

This is execution gone wrong, when you place barriers in front of your readers.

Wouldn't you like this for your next meeting?

One final (and good) example of execution – the brilliant whiteboards by Carolyn Sewell!

These beautiful “doodles” summed up panel discussions in a creative and artistic manner. They’re a great way to remind people of what was discussed. And I’m sure her artistic talent didn’t originate in some strategic planning session.

What’s Next DC is not just another social media conference. With its focus on results, attendees left with lots of good ideas to execute – and not just strategize about.

I’m old enough to remember the early days of the web. Back then (not too long ago, the 1990s), organizations didn’t take this online medium seriously. The web site paled in importance to the newsletter or magazine, at least according the leaders of the time. After all, who reads things on a computer? The Internet was a place for nerds and geeks, for them to discuss Star Trek trivia and learn arcane HTML codes.

If you ran a company or a nonprofit, you really didn’t need a web site, or so people believed. And if you wanted a web site, you could have your nephew build it. He could make something flashy and “cool” like MySpace.

I see the same attitude today toward social media. Why should an organization invest in Facebook or Twitter? Let the interns handle it…

But would you trust an intern to be the voice of your organization? That’s the point I made in a recent article in AOL Government. If you accept the fact that social media is important (and you should, because that’s where the audience is), then why would you hand over these communication efforts to those who know the least about your company? Do you trust college kids to spread your message, respond to questions and interact with potential customers? Do they know the hot-button issues within your company? The language that you use with customers? Your customer service standards and policies? The things that they’re *not* supposed to talk about?

And what happens when the interns leave? They take all that hard-won knowledge about your organization with them, as well as valuable expertise in social media. And they may take the Twitter account as well.

Social media is too important to be left to a transient workforce. Companies and organizations should take a deliberate approach to this dynamic new tool. The keys to the social media kingdom shouldn’t be in the hands of someone who just walked in the door.

Your voice online should be controlled by someone who both knows your company and is familiar with the culture of the web and social media. Look around – you probably have someone already with the requisite experience and interest. They’re probably doing something perceived as more important. But what’s more important than representing your brand in a medium that reaches millions?

Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the very few personal improvement books worth the money. It’s been superseded by the awkwardly-titled StrengthsFinder 2.0 but the message is the same in the new book:

You should concentrate on what you’re best at. Don’t try to improve your weaknesses, instead sharpen the skills that you do better than anyone else. It’s a countervailing message in this age of self-improvement. It says to drop what you suck at (I’m never going to be a great basketball player) and work on what you do best (writing and photography).

The two books contain surveys to identify your unique strengths.  You’ll probably experience an “ah-hah” moment at the results, confirming what you already knew.

The same principle of concentrating on your strengths can be applied to social media efforts. In this new and ever-changing field, how do you determine what to spend time on? Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, FourSquare, Digg, SlideShare, Scribd, Flickr… and on and on and on. You could spend twenty-four hours a day in front of an overheated laptop updating social media sites.

I worked with Janice Hall Booth, a very interesting woman who wrote an inspiring book, Only Pack What You Can Carry. She’s an “adventurista” and an excellent role model for young women who want more out of life than Sex and the City.

Janice had a problem. She wanted to use social media to promote her book but had a full-time job. I’ve seen some of the social media plans for authors – they’re comprehensive, exhausting affairs filled with exhortations such as “get 20 new Twitter followers a day for 30 days.” How do you compel people to follow you? These plans treat all social media channels equally and require herculean efforts to complete.

Also, social media experts are extroverts; writers are not.

I took a different approach. I advised Janice to concentrate on the social media channels that she was most comfortable with. She was more likely to stick with something she was really passionate about and enjoyed. For Janice, this was blogging. Not surprising, since she’s a writer.

For my own social media efforts (for me and Murder in Ocean Hall), I’ve concentrated on blogging and Twitter. I like the constant newsfeed of Twitter, as well as the back-and-forth wittiness with friends. And for writing longer than 144 characters, I have this blog.

There’s a thousand other ways of promoting a book online. GoodReads is a really interesting online community. Facebook marketing ties yourself to the whims of a single online service. A book trailer (like a movie preview) on YouTube is a good idea for graphic novels. An email newsletter is something I’d like to do at some point. I post a lot of photos on Flickr, though they’re about my life in general, not just my book. FourSquare – why do I want people to know where I’m at?

My other piece of social media advice: evaluate after 30 days. What’s working? What’s not? Most social media, like media in general, does not reach a mass audience. You will not have thousands of followers overnight.

Instead, I’d look at your social media efforts based upon your individual strengths. Do you have blog posts that you’re really proud of? Have you made new connections that you treasure? Have you learned something new?

Passion and authenticity are rewarded in social media. Don’t try to do everything. Concentrate on what you enjoy.

It began as a low rumble. I thought someone was moving furniture in my building but then it grew stronger.  I was being shaken, and for a few scary seconds I thought my apartment was going to split in two.

Then it stopped. Outside was a gorgeous sunny day. What happened?

I filed downstairs with my neighbors, none of whom knew exactly what we had experienced. Was this just on our block? I checked Twitter and saw that people from the around the Washington region were tweeting, “Earthquake.” Within seconds, someone had retweeted confirmation from the US Geological Society.

After I posted this anecdote on GovLoop, it was used in Washington Post article on disaster preparedness in federal government. The article highlighted the fact that informal networks, like Twitter, conveyed information more quickly and efficiently than official government channels.

SXSW in 2007

SXSW Interactive is an annual conference of social media and web geeks in Austin. It’s a huge, exhausting event that takes place over a long weekend in March and is popularly known as the conference that introduced Twitter and other new forms of communication.

The criticism now is that it’s gotten too big and too corporate, dominated by giant corporations trying to be hip. And that it’s gotten to be such a chaotic moshpit that it leads to network outages.

I went to SXSW in 2007 and 2008, just the right moment before it became mainstream. The conference taught me to love the brilliant minds at 37signals, whose radically hopeful ideas about the future of work cannot arrive soon enough. I learned that project management should be as simple as possible. Gantt charts and MS Project should be avoided in favor of clear goals that everyone can understand. REWORK is their vision for the ideal work environment, where meetings and busywork are eschewed in favor of collaboration and results. Their philosophy is subversive and attractive for anyone stuck in boring meetings or lengthy conference calls.

A surprising part of SXSW for me was meeting authors and discovering self-publishing. Listening to showmen/charlatans Tucker Max and Timothy Ferris, I realized that I should write and publish a book. Rather than trying to interest a NYC publisher, they just started writing and blogging their adventures and opinions. In the trade show, I also got to examine the slick self-published titles produced by Lulu – they looked and felt exactly like “real” books and were indistinguishable from anything you’d find at Borders. These two lessons:

1. Ignore the gatekeepers and write your book
2. Self-published books are real books

within a year prompted me to write my first novel, Murder in Ocean Hall.

Dave and Margie Newman

However, so much of the best stuff at SXSW happens outside the convention center. Like when I met Dave and Margie Newman in the beer tent, who ended up moving to DC and becoming great friends.

Or when I encountered the strange figure of Reverend Billy, railing against consumerism and Starbucks. And just the experience of getting out of DC and going somewhere warm to eat BBQ and watch women in skirts and cowboy boots was rejuvenating.

Reverend Billy

I realized that I’m more interested in going to Austin than attending SXSW. Unlike when I attended in 2007 and 2008, there are panels relevant to my job as a web editor for government web sites. But the thought of yet another endless discussion by self-appointed thought leaders on “Gov 2.0″ makes me ill. Why go to SXSW to see that?

I hope that the govvies in Austin avoid such seminars and look for the different and the oddball. Roam the streets. Talk to people. Stay out late and get drunk.

Another reason for skipping SXSW is that some of the “keep Austin weird” creative spirit that I like so much has migrated to DC. Unbelievable, yet true.

Just look at my schedule for this month. Last night, I went to screening of short films by a local director – this is someone who is making movies outside of Hollywood. Then on Tuesday is the DCist Exposed Photography Show, a community-based exhibit of photos that embodies the democratic, creative ethos of SXSW. Later in the month, I have the DC Film Salon on my calendar, another communal mediamaking event. I also plan on doing some writing for the Pink Line Project, an online guide to the arts in DC.

The do-it-yourself creative spirt of Austin and SXSW inspired me to create art. Being there made me realize that I wasn’t interested in the stories of startups making millions of dollars, of the next Twitter or Gowalla. And of large organizations trying to adapt to new technology… that doesn’t seem to belong at SXSW at all.

Instead, I was intrigued by individuals making art on their own, whether they were writers, photographers, bloggers or filmmakers.

SXSW demonstrated to me that you could write and publish your own book. Or make a short film. Or create a blog to share your message. It had an enormous influence on me and one that I’m still trying to incorporate into my life.

Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel the need to attend SXSW this year. I’m still working on what I learned from previous years. These are ideas of autonomy and creative self-expression, empowered by new tools such as self-publishing and social media. You don’t need to sit in a convention center to learn that. You just have to participate.

So, late one afternoon, my building caught fire. My apartment was fine; other people weren’t so lucky. This is part one of lessons learned. Check out part two for my thoughts on the importance of communication after the fire.

I got the call around 6:30 PM.

“Oh, Joe, I think your building is on fire.”

It was a friend of mine, John Hanshaw, who lives nearby. He could see my apartment building and said that it was surrounded by fire engines.

I really didn’t believe him at first. DC sends out fire trucks for everything. They roll not just for fires, but for medical calls as well. This is because the ambulances are unreliable and sometimes can’t find the right address. The thinking is that the local fire company knows the neighborhood better.

But this makes the city a “land of sirens”, with fire trucks constantly racing down streets, sirens blaring. After a while, the commotion becomes so much background noise.

At the time, I was a few blocks away, having a drink. I was about to go to an election night party.

I tweeted flippantly:

Within just a couple of minutes I got a  second call, this time from Neil Torda in the mountains of North Carolina. We went to high school together and he knows my place in DC. Seeing my post, he did a Google search.

He tweeted an article about the fire and sent me this terrifying picture.

I walked back, visions of my building completely destroyed.

When I got there, the fire was out. There was a black hole on the 9th floor where an apartment used to be. I hoped that my place, on the 7th floor, on the backside of the building was okay.

My neighbors were sheltering in the lobby of a building around the corner. The building’s management provided pizza and drinks. Later on, the Red Cross distributed blankets.

Everyone wanted to know when they could get back inside. Management said it would be a couple hours. And that they would call us (which they never did).

To me, this seemed hopelessly optimistic. Looking at the burned-out apartment, the broken windows, the smoke and water damage, all the ladder trucks surrounding the building, getting the elevator running, the necessary investigations – there was no way we were getting in that night.

I left and walked over to the Helix, a boutique hotel a couple doors down from where I live. I knew that they were actively involved in the local community, having been a sponsor of the DC Shorts Film Festival, which I volunteer for. I love all the Kimpton properties and have recommended them to out of town visitors.

I told them that I lived next door. I was hoping they would give me a decent rate but instead the manager comped me. He showed me a picture on his Blackberry of my building in flames.

While all this was going on, I had updated my Twitter and Facebook feeds. An outpouring of concern filled my iPhone. Friends asked how I was, shared how they had seen the fire, if they could do anything, if I needed a place to stay. It was incredibly moving.

Unfortunately, my iPhone wasn’t fully charged and it soon died. There’s a perverse thrill you get with disaster. It seems like a crazy adventure – locked out of my apartment! I get to stay at the Helix! Fire trucks! Streets shut down!

But then my phone powered down and I couldn’t talk to anyone. Real worry set in.

I didn’t sleep and walked back early the next morning. Entering my apartment and seeing it exactly as I left it was a moment of incredible relief.

Others were not so fortunate. They have to deal with homes now wrecked by smoke and water. I really didn’t know how bad the fire was until I saw the video of people being rescued from the upper floors of my building. I can’t imagine their terror.

Lessons Learned

1.  Social Media is Great but Better to Have Neighbors

John Hanshaw, who lives two blocks away, told me about the fire. Later on, I commiserated and shared information with my neighbors, people who I had shared small-talk with in the elevator. Friends who lived in DC offered me a place to stay. People called to check in on me. The Helix Hotel put me up, recognizing that they were part of the community.

2. Location Doesn’t Matter

Who confirmed the fire for me? Neil Torda, who lives hundreds of miles away but was sitting in front of a computer.

3. Social Media is Indispensable

I tweeted so that friends and family instantly knew that I was okay. Having parents on Facebook can be occasionally awkward but at least my status updates alleviated their worry.

4. Social Media is News

A three-alarm fire in Washington is big news. How was this story covered? Social media informed the coverage each step of the way. As you can see from this TBD page, updates came in about the fire in real-time and included pictures, videos and tweets from participants. It wasn’t just media covering the story but also included involved parties and those who just happened to be walking by.

5. You Need an Emergency Plan

Leaving my apartment yesterday, I had no idea that I’d have to find another place to stay for the night. “Go to the Helix” is really not a good emergency plan… It would’ve been nice if I had a pre-arranged place to go, with at least a toothbrush and a change of clothes.

6. Charge Your Phone!

I didn’t think I’d be out long so my iPhone wasn’t fully charged. Yet, this was how I communicated with the world and found needed information. When it died, I was essentially lost.

Things could’ve been so much worse. I’m thankful they weren’t.

Chris Anderson, of Wired magazine and “The Long Tail” fame, was the keynote speaker at FOSE this morning. He spoke on “For the People and By the People: Delivering on the Promise of Gov 2.0″.

Anderson started off with an interesting example – the infamous Twitter fail whale. Countless users have bemoaned the unreliability of Twitter, though in fact, the service has been down only occasionally and it’s gotten dramatically better of late. He contrasted this with a couple of stories about government sites. In the first, he had to pay taxes in Delaware for his corporation but their web site was down for the entire weekend before his taxes were due. In another example, he wanted to pay a traffic ticket he received in Truckee, CA, but the town did not take credit cards online, something a teenager could’ve set up. These are much more critical tasks than updating your Twitter feed.

Four Web Rules of the Google Generation

In Anderson’s view, the Google Generation (those who grew up with the Internet) expects government sites to work as well as commercial sites. But I think any regular user of the web thinks this way, no matter the age. He listed four rules of the Google Generation. This is what they expect:

1. Everything should work all the time. 
2. If you can’t find it on Google, it doesn’t exist. 
3. Meet us where we live (Facebook, Flickr, Twitter).
4. We want to interact with your content.

Unfortunately, as Anderson listed in his Delaware example, not everything works all the time on .gov sites. Also, while optimizing your content for Google is a great idea, not all .gov sites do this and some government content is hidden in databases which Google has a hard time searching. There are just a few examples of government in Facebook or Flickr though this is a common practice in the .com and .org worlds. And the idea of people discussing, rating, ranking and remixing government content on a .gov site is something I’ve never seen before (but would love to).

Obstacles to Web 2.0 in Government

Any discussion of Web 2.0 in government soon turns to the innumerable obstacles to bringing social media to government sites. Anderson made the point that these barriers are similar to those to any large company or organization.  They include:

• Outdated technology 
• Legal concerns
• Privacy worries
• Procurement hassles
• Archive issues
• Lack of urgency

In the commercial world, this is why smaller companies are the innovators. They are not saddled with a content management system purchased in the 1990s nor IT policies not updated in more than a decade.

Black Wire/White Wire

Anderson had a story bound to terrify any government CIO. At Conde Nast, he was saddled with many of the same restrictions that afflict any large organization. Old emails got deleted after 30 days, server space was limited, vital email got stuck in spam filters and no one could install software on their machines without approval. His team was frustrated by these restrictions which hindered their effectiveness.

His solution was to opt out of IT support by setting up his own DSL network and servers in his office. Anderson showed the setup, with a black wire for the IT department’s connection and a white wire for his DSL hookup. The black wire only got plugged in to print. In his view, the role of the CIO should be to provide a fat pipe to the Internet and maintain the printers, not tell people what technology they can use.

Consumer Apps > Enterprise Apps

One reason that Anderson cited for seceding from his IT department was that his staff was used to consumer applications (like Gmail and Google Docs) that were superior to their enterprise equivalents (Outlook, Word). Not only were these consumer apps easier to use, they were also available anywhere. Anderson uses Google Docs exclusively. He also listed the new US CIO, Vivek Kundra, as a proponent of using consumer technology in the public space. In his previous role as CTO for the District of Columbia, Kundra brought these apps in-house and established wikis and data feeds to make local government more efficient.

Web 2.0 Thinking

Finally, Anderson presented a list of good and bad words. These are words and phrases to be encouraged, with their bad counterparts in parenthesis:

• fail fast (approval process)
• hosted/cloud (client/server)
• nimble (planning cycle)
• experimental (safe)
• beta (signed off)
• messy (static)
• sure! (maybe next year)

Anderson is an inspiring speaker, particularly on the subject of “failing faster”. He made the point that he’s failed lots of times, in lots of different ways, but each experience taught him something. Failing is a necessary byproduct of experimenting, something that should be encouraged across government.

Some more random thoughts about Transparency Camp 09. Here are my big take-aways from the conference.

Excitement: There’s a tremendous amount of enthusiasm among enlightened advocates of government transparency, fueled by the election of Obama and the mainstreaming of Web 2.0 tools like blogging. There’s a real can-do spirit, which is in marked contrast to continuing bad news about the economy. 

The Importance of Free Beer: How do you get people to hang out after the formal sessions of a conference, for a further exchange of ideas? You offer them free beer, of course (courtesy of Peter Corbett). I saw this at SXSW too. The convivial sharing of booze leads people to make connections they never would’ve made.

Twitter is Useful: This micro-blogging service was a great utility during the conference. Attendees tagged their tweets with #tcamp09, which enabled anyone (even people not at the conference) to see what attendees were saying about the sessions.

Macs are Everywhere: I was pleased to see so many Macs at the conference. The facility at GW had outlets at every table and wifi was available as well, which led to a proliferation of laptops, the majority of which were Macs.

Education is Needed: Advocates of open and accessible government need to learn more about the near infinite complexities of government policies and procedures. A host of rules limit what government can do online. Also, there’s not “one government” as Jeff Levy from EPA repeated over and over. Different government agencies have different IT policies and requirements. Pity the poor developer who wants to create a web application for all of government. 

As someone with a background in government and nonprofit web sites, I got a tremendous amount out of this conference. Attending events like this, you come away with renewed excitement about the possibilities of the web and a host of new ideas to explore.

What’s Transparency Camp?  

This un-conference is about convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.

In practice, this meant a very smart and dedicated group of government and non-government techies devoted their weekend to collaborating, brainstorming and scheming new ways to make government more open and accessible to all of us. What was unique about the un-conference was that it was open and collaborative, where the people in the audience were just as smart as the “experts” presenting. It was also made up as it went along, as topics and panels were put together on the fly, in response to the interests and passions of the attendees.

I attended because I used to be a government web site manager and think that government sites can be better. And that they should be better, for they are paid for by taxpayers. In one session I was in, the question was asked, “What can the public do to make .gov sites better?”

My answer is to keep pushing. There are numerous barriers to improving government sites, from IT security to policy, that can only be overcome through public pressure. The public needs to demand sites that are easier to use and more efficiently managed. Why can’t .gov be like Google?

Perhaps more importantly, the creative, risk-taking spirit of events like Transparency Camp needs to be encouraged within government. There are a lot of very talented people within government who want to blog, use Twitter, publish data in open formats, create mashups and experiment with new technology to better serve taxpayers. These people need to be empowered so that they can more effectively communicate the work of government to the public that pays for it.

Last night, I attended “Pimp My Nonprofit,” an event by NetSquared DC designed to help a worthy nonprofit better use technology. More than thirty people with a wide range of online marketing skills and interests took part in this meetup at the Affinity Lab in Adams Morgan. Drinks and snacks, key to any brainstorming session, were provided by GeniusRocket.

The nonprofit to be pimped was Student Movement for Real Change (SMRC), an organization that was founded to connect American college students with schools in Africa that need assistance. Students apply for internships that, “provide college students on-the-ground development experience, cultural immersion, and the necessary leadership skills to develop sustainable projects that address local needs through a 6 or 8 week internship (depending on the community) in developing communities” to quote the SMRC web site.

Vanessa Carter of SMRC gave a brief overview of SMRC and the challenges they face. Like many nonprofits, they’re a very small organization with a limited budget. Their main marketing objectives are to obtain:

• Interns. They’ve had success getting applicants for their programs in Africa through the use of Google Ads. These search-based ads are how most potential interns find out about the program.
• Donations. They recently redesigned their web site and it includes a nice red donate button on the home page. They’ve also had limited success raising money through Facebook Causes.

The question Vanessa had for the group was, “Out of the sea of social media tools – Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, blogs – which is worth doing?” With a very small staff, limited time and a reluctance to learn anything complicated, which of these tools would be most effective for her organization?

The group weighed in with their advice. Many of the participants were active users of these tools and brought lessons learned from applying these tools to similar nonprofits. They provided both strategic insight and concrete tactical advice:

• Facebook: Given that SMRC wants to reach college students, Facebook would be the place to prioritize. While some of the group thought that Facebook was too broad of a social network, the consensus was that Facebook was the network that college students are on all the time. The advice was that SMRC should expand its presence on Facebook.
• Facebook Ads: Facebook knows an extraordinary amount about its users and can provide very targeted ads, which is pretty frightening, but would be effective for SMRC. The ads could be run when students are looking for internships.
• MySpace: While a comment was made that MySpace was “over”, this service is used by vast numbers of high school students, who might be future SMRC interns.
• Google Ads: SMRC has had success with Google Ads but the advice was to look at the metrics behind the campaigns, to analyze what search terms were working and adjust accordingly.
• Twitter: Nothing brings out controversy like Twitter! The group went back and forth about this, about the wonders of Twitter (I agree) but that it’s really an early-adopter tool and not yet mainstream (I agree again).
• Blogs: SMRC already has a few blogs on their site. Everyone agreed that blogs are necessary in this day and age but that more guidance is needed for bloggers and that they need to be done more consistently.
• Video: The wonders of the Flip camera were much extolled, for it allows video to be cheaply shot and uploaded to YouTube. This would be an ideal tool for SMRC.
• Email Listservs: It’s very Web 1.0 but is still an effective tool.
• The SMRC web site: While the site was just redesigned, the group thought it could be improved upon through the addition of the tag line, describing the organization, and by better using the home page real estate.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Nonprofits need better tools to manage their relationships with donors. Nobody seemed too excited about their CRM system.

At the end of the meeting, the folks at Genius Rocket offered to help Vanessa produce a video ad for SMRC. So, she not only left with a long (and hopefully useful) list of to-dos, she also received some donated assistance. And all of us geniuses who offered our help got tasty snacks and the satisfaction of helping a good cause.