Earlier this year I reviewed some of the THINKaha series of books: Leadership Tweet and Quality Tweet.

Recently HappyAbout.info released a new book in the THINKaha series, Social Media Nonprofit Tweet.

It’s an exercise in crowdsourcing. The front cover says Janet Fouts wrote the book with Beth Kanter, but five pages in you’ll see the cast of characters who contributed to this book of bite-sized advice.

As with the entire THINKaha series, the idea is innovative: distilling down the most important advice into a series of tweets, this time specifically for the nonprofit sector.

Here’s a taste of some of the tweet-sized observations:

You already communicate, campaign, fundraise, serve and build community locally. With social media, you can do that with the world!

Search engines love social media. It’s like candy to them.

Focus on level of engagement, not raw numbers; leaders and creators, not sign-ups; movement and conversion across the web.

Something strange is happening here. It used to be that the web would provide you with the bite-sized pieces of advice, and a printed book would give you the substance. In this case, it’s reversed. The bite-sized advice is here on the page, and the in-depth stuff is on the blogs of some of the authors. Just look at the average post length on Janet and Beth’s blogs. There’s amazing value in each post.

I’m not sure the reversal works for me personally. When I read a book, I’m looking for narrative, I want to be led on a journey exploring an issue.

However, this could be just great for someone who’s new to social media, for whom the tweet-sized insights (like those above) could be great conversation-starters.

I guess no book exists in a vaccuum. Or at least, books like this don’t. Like other forms of media (social or otherwise) they exist in an ecosystem. This book may exist in conjunction with presentations, conversations, actual tweets, blog posts and videos – among other things. The aim is clear: to explain specifically to nonprofits how social media can make them more effective.

Bonus extra reading: Janet’s story of how the book came about.

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The word “engagement” gets thrown around a lot, especially in connection with social media. The Art of Engagement by Jim Hauden has nothing to do with social media, but everything to do with getting everyone on the same page.

Hauden’s company, Root Learning, helps companies engage their staff through collaborative drawings that then get transformed into paintings by professional artists. It’s a unique take on collaboration that overcomes a common communications problem: we say the same words, but mean different things!

How does this connect with social media? Social media has the potential to create the same kind of powerful collaboration, not through paintings but through photos, videos, wordles and other visual stimuli. And again – like last week’s iJumpTV – it comes back not to the technology but to the new skills we must learn.

Have you ever been in a situation where a drawing would have made the difference between success and failure?

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How do you handle information overload? One Austrian librarian had an interesting method – and an interesting explanation for it – in the book I review today, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

While talking about the book (which I partly read, admittedly) I was reminded of Howard Gardner’s 5 Minds for the Future. Gardner talks about the need for a depth of discipline, even as we need to get more cross-disciplinary.

Such talk of deep discipline then reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, which says you can master anything if you put in 10,000 hours. Although I haven’t read the book, that’s okay, because I followed the advice in How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read … nicely completing this circular, three-for-the-price-of-one book review.

How does this affect us in our daily life and work?

1. Information overload is a fact of life. Do you remember the last time you wished there was more information in your life? Yet relevance is still a struggle. The first book has some surprising strategies.
2. Our fast-moving times require innovative, cross-disciplinary thinking, yet we still need a depth of discipline or we truly will be jacks of all trades, masters of none.
3. This means that to our initial discipline we must add the skill of collaboration. We must realise that we don’t hold all the answers, nor could we ever.

It’s summed up by a great quote I read today:

“If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you recognize that your liberation and mine are bound up together, then let us walk together.” -Lila Watson

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Can you fit weighty thoughts into just 140 characters? Find out:

I reviewed:

Twitterature

Think Tweet

Leadership Tweet

Quality Tweet

Also mentioned, The Best Ideas are Free, and ChangeThis, a source of much inspiration and cogitation!

Happy reading!

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Getting stuff done is pretty important. Richard Hollingum and Mario McMillan could have written a book about how to get stuff done, but they did the opposite: How Not To Do Things is a clever guide on exactly how you can accomplish nothing.

A great insight into why change sometimes just doesn’t happen.

Why cover it on iJumpTV? Because using social media in your organisation is about far more than getting the technology right. It’s about introducing and maintaining change – and you can’t do that successfully without knowing the barriers you’ll face.

What books have you been reading over the holidays?

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If you haven’t subscribed to iJumpTV , you’ve been missing out on some exciting stuff, as well as thought-provoking book reviews.

I would say that, wouldn’t I! But seriously, while many social media blogs talk a lot about the tools, these interviews and book reviews look at the larger issues of how to manage a large organisation through the process of change .

The most recent book review is the contrarian Against the Machine , which I disagreed with (you might have guessed I would).

And just fresh off the press today, an interview with Luigi Cappel about the Location Innovation Awards , designed to get people thinking up clever ways to use mobile for marketing and business.

Don’t miss out on this valuable resource, delivered right to your computer and viewable on your iPhone, iPod, or other portable video viewer. Subscribe today .

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