In order to know what you want to do with social media, you must first determine where your charity stands right now. If you do not have a business plan, you must create one. If you have not reviewed your business plan recently, you should review and update it. Only by knowing the current status of your charity can you determine where to steer it.

Professional libraries of well-lit, properly focused and cropped images that can be cheap to purchase would seem like an enticing option. By flipping through a few pages, you can find images that help project the scene and attitude of your copy. Just purchase a few photos and paste them on your page, and your done. What's not to love?

Misusing stock photos can actually hurt your corporate image.

Adding these images to your website, brochures, and other promotional material can elevate the professional image of your organization. When not done properly, it can make your company image look schlocky, impersonal, or even temporary. Follow these considerations to determine if and when to incorporate a library of stock images in your marketing campaigns.

This is what democracy looks like!" You can hear this chant and many others at the Occupy marches around the world. The assembly of large quantities of people is promoting communication that otherwise would not have occurred. People are exchanging new ideas and teaching the use of previously-proven concepts (like non-violent protest) from previous protest movements. They are taking mobile communication beyond the realm of obligatory social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Both low-tech and high-tech approaches to information exchange are getting a facelift from this movement. Investment in improving upon and delivering this communication technology is becoming the next cottage industry.

Whatever your opinion of the Occupy protests, we are all benefiting from the advancements in communication that are coming out of this movement. "The whole world is watching."

This time of year, charities receive a greater influx of donations than they normally do at other times of the year. Donors are buying gifts for friends and family, and continue the giving spirit with their favorite charities. Financial advisers review clients' accounts to see what tax benefits their clients can receive with an offset of donations to 501(c)(3) charities.

Good manners demand that charities send thank you letters to the donors recognizing their donations. This administrative requirement can take a lot of time to generate. How does a charity efficiently organize their thank you letters and send them out?

Quick Response Codes (QR codes) are gaining more prominence in marketing and ad space. These codes provide you with a hyperlink that takes you to a web page for more information about the product or service. Every avenue for print media is an opportunity to embellish the experience with multimedia web content. Think of the possibilities of reducing printing costs: Instead of taking up room in print for detailed information, adding a QR code will get the information to the potential customers at a fraction of the ad space.

Think of your audience. Know your demographic before implementing this rising trend.

You sign up for a newsgroup, or make a purchase online, on a website you have never used previously. The website needs to know who you are, so it asks for you to create a new account, consisting of at least a new user name and a password. If you have a hard enough time remembering where you left your keys in the morning, there is a good chance that remembering user names and passwords to your 50 most favorite websites is too much to ask. If you do have a way of remembering 50 unique user names and passwords (writing them on a sticky note taped to your monitor is not the most secure way of remembering your passwords), many of these websites will have faults in the secure storage of your information, making a unique user name and password nigh worthless. Passwords can be stored in plain text, meaning that anyone who can access the database can read your user name and password (and can likely guess what user name and password you may use for the other 49 websites you log into). Some websites may store your password in an encrypted form, but have an algorithm to revert the password to plain text; if there is a way to make the password human readable, it is a favorite target of hackers. Try clicking on the "Forgot Password" prompt of the websites you access. If they email you the password you used to create your account, then that website would have used either of these two methods to store your private information. No matter how creative your password, it is no longer secure. There is hope in the realm of security to keep the number of user names and passwords you use to a minimum while trusting that they will be stored securely.

The Baby Boomers have been referred as the pig in the python. The large bulge in the age demographics has necessitated ingenuity and advancement in social, economic, political, and geographic movements. To facilitate the spike in numbers of this age group, families moved to the first suburban neighborhoods, experienced an economic boom as manufacturing and marketing moved goods into those homes, and spurred a political and environmental consciousness that challenged the status quo. As Baby Boomers reach retirement, the need to share their great wealth of knowledge amongst the younger generations is tantamount for sustaining and even advancing what we know. It is only fitting that Knowledge Management has advanced to a level for effectively capturing that knowledge, via the semantic web.

Tim Bernars-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web (a.k.a., The Web), has spent three decades defining the standards that bring us web pages on our computers and mobile devices. Since his initial proposal in March 1989, The Web has evolved from displaying read-only documents to the interactive social-networking websites we use today. One of the driving technologies of The Web is HTML. It takes these web documents and presents the information in a readable form on your screen with which you can interact. This information is designed specifically to be human-readable. The volume of data on The Web has grown to such a degree as to necessitate computers to read these documents and try to understand its content as closely to a human as possible. Enter the Semantic Web.

A client of mine asked me how to start a blog and make money with it. Unfortunately, you will not gain instant success overnight. It takes time to develop a writing style for your blog, a depth of topics to write, and to gain momentum with a readership. If you go to any of the popular, ready-made blog websites out there (e.g., Blogger, WordPress, etc.), they can show the mechanics on how to set up your own blogspace. The tips in this blog will prepare you mentally and train you to write a blog.

Search engines are the dynamos that drive traffic to websites. For them to drive traffic to your website, you must first understand how they find your website and include it in search results. Search engines, like Google and Yahoo, typically find out about your website if another website they are currently crawling links to your website. With the blossoming of social networking, you can create a page on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networking site and invite your friends to join and subscribe to those pages. On these social networking sites, link back to key pages to your website that you wish to promote. Make sure your links accurately reflect the content on the pages to which you are linking. The text of the link should describe the contents of the target page. Keep these social networking sites public so the search engines can find them and link back to your website pages. The search engines will then be able to find your website and crawl its contents.

Bloomberg Businessweek reported that in the fourth quarter of 2010, more smartphones were sold than PCs. Sales of smartphones are expected to reach $120 billion in sales. With the rise in access to websites through mobile devices, you should ensure that your web site is both viewable and usable to the mobile user. Two areas in which you should focus are content and layout.

With each day leading up to April 15, more tax returns are getting filed with federal and state agencies. Individuals hopng to maximize their deductions are looking to their nonprofit donations from the prior year. Only those donations with a corresponding US Tax ID Number can be verified with the nonprofit's records and the donation amount. Nonprofit organizations should include their Tax ID Number with all of their communications, including web pages, newsletters, brochures, mailings, business cards, email, and receipts. Publishing this number makes it easier for contributors come tax time.

Social networking is not new. It did not start with MySpace or Facebook. It is a natural part of humans integrating with their community. Over the past few years the trend of social networking has been taking place more on the Internet. A 2010 Nielsen report shows that more computer time is being devoted to social networking. It is not only the 18-34 crowd who participates; the report lists Facebook as the #3 most visited site for people 65 and over.

Business networking is not new. It did not start with LinkedIn or Contact Relationship Management applications. Businesspeople have been shepherding contacts and leads to make sales ever since we started trading with each other. Both business and social networking are blurring together on the Internet.

How do you keep your social life separate from your business life online?

"Search Engine Optimization" and "Search Engine Optimizer" both take the acronym SEO. You could say an SEO performs SEO on websites, and those in the know would realize you are not talking cyclically. The best time to hire an SEO is when you are planning the design or redesign of your website. When brought into the project in its early stages, the SEO can advise on the best ways to architect the site for search engines to find and categorize the content.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been around ever since the first Internet search engines started crawling websites. Search engines use an algorithm for ranking website content against similar pages found on the Internet. SEO recognizes those algorithms and tries to work the ranking more to their website content's favor.

One of the most important tasks you can take with your business is to communicate with your customers/donors. A communication campaign that includes regular newsletters, blogs, and postings to social networking sites keeps your business at the top of their mind. In order to be successful, you must track the response to your communication with sales/donations.

Projects may start with a burst of energy. As the project drags on with no defined milestones or markers of accomplishment, enthusiasm will dwindle. Energy can often come from the project lead, but be sure to look to your team for renewed springs of energy.

Positive environment is contagious. If your team contains members who love to share their accomplishments, have a Show-and-Tell session as part of your team meetings to energize the rest of your team. Be sure that the Show-and-Tell session does not take over your entire meeting, otherwise you will be focusing on past accomplishments, instead of looking ahead to completing future tasks.

There are many tips to help increase the speed in which your site's pages load for your visitors. The tips are found in three main areas for optimization: The source code that writes the web page, the network and bandwidth considerations, and the visitor's browser settings.

The Source Code

The page should be as efficient and as small as possible. When someone requests a page from a website, the website should start sending the page within milliseconds. There are ways for developers to send the pages almost instantaneously. These methods include, going to the database as few times as possible, deciding which parts of a page should be cached and which parts should not, using the most efficient code (e.g., loops, traversing arrays, incrementing variables), and determining if parts of the web page can be delivered immediately, while more information can be delivered a few seconds later or on demand from the site visitor.

Security firm, McAfee, has reported that in the first half of 2010 there has been a sharp increase in the number of attacks on websites and email, in the form of viruses and spyware. These programs can spread from the website to your computer just by you visiting an infected website.

Two of my websites, and a few websites of my colleagues have experienced several infections over the past few weeks. I have audited my websites, upgraded a couple of vulnerable components, and want to report to you that they are now clean and available to visit once again without fear of your computer getting infected.

Whether you run your business out of your garage, studio, or own a store, you can present yourself with the professional services of mid-size to large companies. From the customer's perspective, they will choose a business based on the confidence they have in the company. You do not need a huge marketing budget to get there. Here are some more simple ways to round out your company's branding: