Flickr photo by red5standingbyLet's kick off February with some advice for getting your organization (or yourself) advocating for your cause with free social media tools.

First, there's Twitter. This tool should be familiar to the NTEN community by now, but just in case you're tuning in for the first time, Twitter is a free social networking/micro-blogging tool that allows you to submit short updates to your network via the web, your mobile device, or a third-party application; you also receive short updates from the network you're "following."

How to apply it to your mission:

• Update your volunteers, constituents, and friends with the latest news about your cause (a bill, a candidate, a campaign, an event, etc.).
• Organize attendees or participants at an event or project in real-time.
• Engage a community on a personal level -- Beth Kanter leveraged her network on Twitter to help her win the Giving Challenge.

You may want to read this article on Read/Write Web about Twitter's emergence as a viable communications platform. Note the helpful information and considerations for how to use it!

Nancy Schwartz, over at Getting Attention, is doing some research on nonprofit taglines. "Effective taglines complement an org's name, convey the unique value it delivers to its community and differentiates it from the competition," she says. "But more often, nonprofit taglines are vague, ambiguous, over-reaching, too abstract or simply non-existent."

When you've got a moment, take her short survey at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=zjXNjEU9fh1wCcHCZelFYQ_3d_3d

Nancy promises to provide a copy of her report to all respondents who request it.  We may all benefit from her findings.

Kevin Lee from ClickZ wrote an article about how the experts in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are doing so well these days, they're ready and willing to give back to the community.

There's even a network, SEMcares, which, according to its mission statement, helps "connect volunteer and discount search engine marketers with nonprofit and other deserving organizations that could benefit from search engine marketing to drive donations or further their cause and awareness." Kevin also pointed out SEMPO, which is the nonprofit professional association of search engine marketers; he's urged them to step up the service options to benefit nonprofits.

Kevin points out that, even with the help of the Google Grant program, nonprofits continue to hire professional marketers to manage their marketing efforts. Nonprofit organizations generally need help not only with implementing ads, but with effectively developing and tracking online marketing strategies that consider both the traditional business models as well as their unique missions.