If you work in the nonprofit space and are anywhere near technology, you HAVE heard of Beth Kanter and Allison Fine. Well, now they’ve come together to write an amazing book that you absolutely must read, titled “The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change.”

The book is packed with brilliant concepts from cover to cover: social capital, network weaving, social culture, the ladder of engagement, do what you do best and network the rest and microplanning, just to name a few. But The Networked Nonprofit is not about tactics (though there’s lots of great examples in it). Fine and Kanter take you through the basics and the thought process you need to be in, in order to have your nonprofit successfully enter the social media space and thrive in it.

From listening to sharing, from fundraising to affecting change on- and offline, The Networked Nonprofit looks at social media for nonprofits as part of your multichannel strategy, also taking into account the stories others share about your organization, the way you communicate over email, your web site presence, your Google ads, your media outreach and most definitely your offline presence (face-to-face events).

Being a hound for books that overlap nonprofits and social media, I can tell you The Networked Nonprofit is the best out there today!

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Reading “Rework” is a lot like the experience you get from 37Signals (the company behind Basecamp and many other web-based productivity tools, whose founders wrote the book).

37Signals sticks to their philosophy and they don’t care too much if you don’t like what they stand for: they believe in it and stick their product development efforts to it. This is highly commendable: sticking to your guns in the face of criticism (which will always be there) is tough. But it can come across as arrogant at times.

When/if you get past the discomfort some of the controversial positions from Fried and Heinemeier may generate, you start to see why these guys have been so successful at what they do. They have a firm stand against some wide-prevailing practices: workaholism, growth for the sake of growth, meetings (they call them toxic) and letting your customers outgrow you, to name a few.

At face value, many of these propositions may sound outrageous to most, but give yourself a chance to read through “Rework“: you will not only find yourself questioning some of the things you do in your organization… I bet you will find yourself reading it again and circulating it within your team!

Great starting point to make sense of viral business growth

Adam Penenberg first entered my radar in 2008, when an interview he wrote about Gina Bianchini (co-founder of Ning, a platform that lets you create your own social network) was published in Fast Company. In it, he also interviewed Marc Andreessen and introduced the rest of us to viral loops, showing how Ning was growing virally by virtue of a “double viral loop”: every social network creator is a user and every user is a potential network creator. At the time of this review, there are nearly 2 million social networks on Ning.

Penenberg breaks down Viral Loop in three parts: Viral Businesses, Viral Marketing and Viral Network. In the first part, he walks the reader from the original viral models (Tupperware and Ponzi schemes); through a fascinating story of the first online expansion viral loop which led to the introduction of Andreessen’s Mosaic and, later, Netscape too; and wraps up with a detailed explanation of Ning, how it accomplishes its viral growth and the elements (technical and cultural) that make viral businesses possible.

The Viral Marketing part, shares stories of Hotmail and the Diet Coke-Mentos Geysers video among others, giving interesting insights into accomplishing viral growth through marketing. The Viral Networks part takes up almost half the book. It dedicates individual chapters to the most successful networks that grew virally: I only wish he had dedicated more space to discussing Twitter.

It was very interesting to read how initial stiff competition between PayPal and eBay (two of the companies covered) resulted in the latter buying the PayPal (dubbed as “the first stackable network” by Penenberg), after eBay attempted to go against them with their own flavor of the service. Viral Loop closes leaving the door open to the future, discussing the search for a new ad unit to adequately fit the new space of viral networks and privacy matters in this new era.

Although I felt there was a missed opportunity to discuss more in depth about the importance of interactions between users (there seemed to be more emphasis on just number of users alone), if you want to understand of how companies like Ning, Facebook and Paypal have grown virally, this is a great starting point. Another title I recommend in connection with this one is Sarah Lacy’s Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, another great title that complements Penenberg’s book very nicely.

I just finished reading Dan Zarrella’s book and I am very impressed. If you are new to the world of social media or wondering how to make it fit your marketing strategy, this book is a perfect starting point. Dan lays out all the dimensions of social media in an easy-to-understand way, outlining the do’s and don’t's for each of them. It doesn’t pretend to be a Bible of the topic: for in-depth tactics for each leg of your social media marketing strategy, you will need to pick up other titles. But The Social Media Marketing Book gives you a very complete feel for what lies ahead, should you want to market your brand through social media, something that you will soon realize not to be an option but a must.

Beyond that, I cannot help but agree with the reviewers that point out the lack of substance in this work by Godin… By the end of the book, you are inevitably left wondering why did he need to publish an entire book about it. There’s really indeed an unfortunate lack of substance in Tribes.

Instead, I recommend The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) and Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable.

The daily winners were be posted on this blog entry and @ningfordummies.

Congrats to every one of the winners and thanks for such a fun giveaway!

Watson tries to distribute the future evenly
Tom Watson closes his title “CauseWired” with a quote from novelist William Gibson: “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” It seems, once you are done with the book, that Watson is determined to more evenly distribute the future by trying to dissect it for the benefit of the readers.

The advent of Facebook Causes, Kiva, Change.org and Social Actions is only the tip of the iceberg. Yet, Watson is well aware that the new social web (i.e., Web 2.0) is a means to an end; he says: “… after all the clicking, emailing, viewing and posting, people need to get up from their chairs and step outside.” He acknowledges the importance of having new media become an enabler of social change offline: whether you give five dollars, make phone calls or host an event…

The book is thought-provoking and stimulating while keeping things real and keeping the hype aside. It is not only a must-read for all nonprofits evaluating social media (a way to say, evaluating staying current) but also for anyone wanting to understand how new media are affecting the way we affect social change.

This book is not about specific technologies, though you will find many enabling platforms mentioned and exemplified. Neither does it offer a framework for businesses and individuals to follow, to embrace Web 2.0 and the new social internet, though his chapter titled “Promise, Tool, Bargain” comes close to offering a roadmap for the times ahead.

In “Here Comes Everybody” the essence beyond the hype, the fundamentals that make this technological revolution we’re in the middle of a turning point in history. I highly recommend it.

The author takes the time to walk the reader through the basics of properly setting up a Twitter account, finding and following others, tweeting, re-tweeting, finding information on Twitter: in short, all that you need to make the most of Twitter.

He moves on to explore numerous clients and web-based applications to help you maximize your Twitter experience: as far as I can tell, he leaves nothing out. If you have been using Twitter extensively for a while, you still stand to learn a few things from it: having been using using Twitter for 2 years now, I found a number of useful resources that I was unaware of. But if you are new to Twitter, Twitter Tips, Tricks, and Tweets will get you up to speed after you are done with it.

Beth is the “nonprofitologist” of Social Media, i.e. one of the sharpest cookies around in terms of social media and nonprofits.

I had a chance to finally meet her and autograph her copy of “Ning For Dummies” while @ NTC last week. She recently held a giveaway of four copies of the book.