Web Browsers: Chrome and Opera

Google Chrome
Actually I haven't used Chrome till late February, 2010 when a friend told me all the great features Chrome provided. Without any doubt, Google constantly produces wonderful ideas and great applications to make our life easier. Well, I am not talking about Buzz here:-P.

Chrome is a great web browser I would recommend you to try. It carries Google search engine toolbar, enables full-text history search, remembers zoom level by site, and opens everything in a new tab for you. It is easy to use, though I cannot speak for Mac users due to lack of that experience.

Opera
The second one I recently find helpful as I learn HTML language, is Opera. This web browser has one feature I really admire. Opera displays the value of TITLE in a small box when the pointer is over a link. Most browsers have ignored this useful attribute. Yet it is helpful as I am one the people would feel reluctant to click on a link without knowing what's in it first.
Opera also uses the value of TITLE as the subject line in email links. So when you click on the email link, it automatically helps us fill out the subject of the email as something like "response to XX". Isn't it great?

Market Share

Below is the market share of different web browsers. Apparently Chrome and Opera don't take a large piece of the market cake. Still good to know about their features.
I don't know if you are interested or not, but html code tutorial is a helpful web site.

How to Evaluate Social Media Use for Nonprofits Part II

Various organizations use social media to help with their products and services. Nonprofit organizations especially tend to rely on social media since they are for free. When they use social media, they will wonder about the same question: how well does the organization use social media.
The following are several social media metrics (some in my last post) and how to evaluate social media use with these metrics.

Volunteers

You may let people in your social media communities learn about the wonderful volunteer experience, which will not only build your organizational image, but also help you secure new volunteers through utilizing social media.

Event Attendance

Holding events on a regular basis will help you keep your supporters and donors updated about your nonprofit. But that is not enough. Using social media, you can spread the word out easily and people will likely interact with you before the event on the social media venues.

Testimonials

Clients, supporters and donors may leave a comment on your organization's facebook/twitter/etc., don't let it die on the page. You may include the testimonial in your newsletter, event brochure, and everything else that represent supporters' voices. They like that, and you win a good reputation.

Facebook Comments and Twitter Mentions

This is hard and boring to track but definitely rewarding if you keep doing it. It will show how successful your social media plan is. If your organization facebook gets few comments and is seldom mentioned, you may need another social media plan.

Fans, Followers and Friends

To keep a high social media ROI, the quality of fans/followers/friends is important too.

How to Evaluate Social Media Use for Nonprofits Part I

Various organizations use social media to help with their products and services. Nonprofit organizations especially tend to rely on social media since they are for free. When they use social media, they will wonder about the same question: how well does the organization use social media.
The following are ten social media metrics and how to evaluate social media use with these metrics.
First of all, nonprofits need to keep an eye on their website traffic. You may wonder why you spend a lot of efforts on designing the website and updating everything, yet you get few responses. That's when you will need to track your website's traffic logs and visitors from month to month. You will need to see the change as you branch out to a larger and larger community.

Another important way to evaluate social media use is blog traffic. Nonprofits may find it hard to update blogs on a regular basis, yet this turns out to be a tremendous help to the organization.Blogging may have been a missing piece in most nonprofits' social media strategy package. The nonprofit I work for---InterAct---keeps blogs on community websites like ShareTriangle, MyNC, and GOLO. InterAct was very specific about what web hosts they chose to start blogs. ShareTriangle, MyNC and GOLO are basically the three major event and information sharing community websites that everyone can post blogs and respond to one. This gives some leeway to nonprofits in terms of sharing their events and fundraiser schedules, educating the public about a social issue, and asking for support from local communities. Also, monitoring blog traffic will be necessary in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a blog. To simply put, you may not only count how many replies you get for each blog post, but also how much traffic your blog generate for your official website.

The last one in this post is e-letter tactics. E-letter will help people who are captive audience become voluntary. In other words, people are 'forced' to read your e-letter and get the information, and if they are interested, they will dig more. That's how e-letter works to help promote website traffic, webinar registration, event participation, and even donations.
Content of e-letter is important. Nowadays people are fed up with sales spams, so your e-letter must be personal relevant. If your audience are women with younger children, then your organization e-letter may want to touch several topics like parenting, early schooling, etc. They will attract the audience and thus convince them that your organization will be of some help.
If nonprofits manage this tool well, they will likely see more and more people signing up for their e-letters.

Good PR for Google：A nicely designed Google Analytics Blog

As a web analysis tool, Google Analytics also utilizes different social media for its brand and PR. As you can see, analytics.blogspot.com is Google Analytics' blog for GA users.
In its blog, GA team talks about tips that makes websites work better like a post called "make the web faster". Also included are the training videos and several tutorials for using GA. A good point about having a blog rather than keep a website alone is that, it will allow interactivity and information exchange. From the blog, GA team can learn what their customers are looking for, where they are stuck with GA, and what they did well to help. With all the interactivity, it can tremendously help the customers to answer their tough questions or long-time concerns that are not able to be addressed with an official website only.
Web metrics are getting more and more important as more and more professionals start recommending them to their management team. Instead of putting tons of hours of job in vain, people are willing to monitor and see what's going on. GA provides a perfect venue for that. GA's blog helps fill the gap of new users and keep an eye on the technology change that their old customers need to be aware of.
This is a successful social media application for Google. What do you think?