Some resources, stories and events regarding social media that will help you balance all the hype with the reality of using such:

1. TechSoup’s final live Twitter chat in its Nonprofit Social Media 101 (NPSM101) series is Monday, May 23 at 9 a.m. Pacific Time USA. Join in for a lively discussion on the value, ways to use, and best practices in tagging. Tagging is used in almost all major social sites, including 5 of the 6 TechSoup features in its newly launched NPSM101 wiki (Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook). Thinking about how to tag your messages and photos will substantially increase the number of people viewing your online activities – and, ultimately, getting involved in your organization. You participate in this TechSoup Twitter Chat by following the tag #nptagging on Twitter, and including that tag in any of your own questions or responses during the event. You can also follow on this Tweetchat.com link. A Twitter chat event an intense experience, but I have enjoyed my participation in two of the last three TechSoup events way more than I thought I would.
2. Few charities are raising significant amounts of money via social media, says a recent study regarding such. Fewer than 3 percent of the survey’s 11,196 nonprofit respondents reported raising more than $10,000 through such tools. Does that mean nonprofits, NGOs and other mission-based organizations engaging in social media isn’t really worth the effort? No. But it does mean that we need to stop talking about social media the way so many talked about the web back in the 1990s – that just having a presence will be a financial windfall. Donations come from cultivation, trust-building and proven results that an organization is getting results. Social media needs to be used strategically, and should be integrated into a variety of other, OFFline activities.
3. By posing as a savvy junior analyst or a graduate student seeking sources for a paper, some people have been successful at building relationships with employees at certain companies and getting those employees to divulge sensitive information, as this story relates. I find it amusing that people ask me endless questions about Internet security related to protecting their nonprofit organization from a hacker, or preventing volunteers from violating confidentiality policies while never wondering if paid staff might do the same, but they never think about this very real scenario: staff willingly handing over information in a kind of online seduction. Confidentiality is an onling training issue, one that needs to be revisited repeatedly at organizations, and this proves it.
4. Social media will be used against you. That’s one of the statements by an organizer of the Social Media, Internet and Law Enforcement conference in Chicago. Police have been using social networking sites to identify and investigate suspects, but now criminals are using such sites to identify and investigate law enforcement officers, including undercover police. In addition, hostage-takers and suspects who barricade themselves in buildings are monitoring social media to track police movements in real time, and gang members are launching their own surveillance operations targeting police. Nonprofits, NGOs and other mission-based organizations often have activists working against their work as well, and need to remember that those program saboteurs are also online.
5. The U.S. State Department has quietly abandoned its America.gov site to refocus its efforts on social media. And I think it’s a bad idea. Not the social media part, but the abandoning the web part. Embrace social media – but do NOT get rid of your web site!

Happy Friday, everyone.