Michael Silberman was was the National Meetup Director for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and is now the senior strategist at consultancy EchoDitto. EchoDitto provides interactive online community consulting services to a wide variety of high profile nonprofit and business clients. Their client list includes Air America Radio, the U.N. World Food Programme, the SEIU and many more. In addition to helping other organizations use new tools, EchoDitto themselves blog, use RSS feeds and share their social bookmarking archives on the front page of their company web site.

Michael also helps organize Net Squared events in Washington D.C.

In the following short chat, Michael and I talked about bringing new web technologies into established organizations.

Marshall:

Can you tell me about your approach to these emerging technologies in the context of the large, established organizations that you work with?

Michael:

Well, as we were talking about the other day regarding John Edwards [using Bittorent], our primary objective is always to first identify the strategic goals and then to work into creative technological applications or tactics for meeting those goals.

With the larger institutions and organizations, we usually try to break off a piece of a campaign or initiative first, so that we can help them test the waters. Start small, collect some data, see what's working, and then go on from there. But the willingness to embrace technology generally has to come from the top.

All of these large organizations seem to have their handful of evangelists scattered throughout, but if the top isn't bought in, then it's hard to make headway.

Marshall:

When you are collecting data on first uses, what sorts of metrics are available?

Michael:

It all depends because each project has its own metrics -- for an ideas contest like SinceSlicedBread.com, we see what the conversion rate is of people visiting the site to people submitting or reviewing ideas. Or for a petition, how many and how quickly are they signing?

Marshall:

Are there Web 2.0/ social web type tools that are already tried and true? Which are the strongest in your experience?

Michael:

Tried and true at this point is bulk email and blogs -- these are sort of baseline communications tools for starting a dialogue with people. Tagging plays a supporting role there, as well as audio and video blogging, etc. Then i think a lot of the other 2.0-type tools, like virtual worlds and MMORPGs [Massively Multiplayer Online Games] can play increasingly important roles depending on what a group is trying to accomplish.

Marshall:

RSS?

Michael:

Easy to incorporate and important for keeping a committed core updated, but i think the data shows that it's still not yet widely understood. Again, easy to incorporate and include for those who use it, but I wouldn't consider it part of a core strategy. It's a benefit of blogging and related things. But it's not an end. [I totally disagree with this and believe instead that RSS should be core to nonprofit tech work. Publishing RSS feeds is the most high-profile use of the technology, but strategic reading of feeds is even more important in my mind. -Marshall]

Marshall:

What sorts of best practices are you seeing emerge around blogging and are they different for nonprofits than for corporate bloggers?

Michael:

I think the core principles are generally same for nonprofit or corporate blogs. To be good they need to be authentic and have unique content. Organizations or businesses most successful at blogging are those most willing to be transparent about what they're doing, thinking, having a two-way dialogue instead of using the blog to broadcast announcements.

Allowing for some vulnerability and humanity to shine though -- it's hard and not for everyone.

Michael Silberman is the senior strategist at consultancy EchoDitto. The following are the last five items tagged by EchoDitto and linked to the company's home page.