I recently worked with Rusty Coats of Coats2Coats consulting.  He suggests a “Rule of Ten” for Twitter. He thinks that every ten tweets should follow a 3-3-3-1 rule, meaning a Twitter user posts 3 tweets about their own or their organization’s work and ideas, 3 are retweets of posts by others, 3 are URL or links of interest (e.g. an news article), and 1 is a humorous post.

Angela Maiers recommends a Twitter Engagement Formula of 70-20-10 which breaks down as:

• 70 percent of your tweets share resources — blog postings, articles, opinions and tools
• 20 percent of your tweets engage in conversations and connections
• 10 percent of your tweets “chirp,” or chat about yourself, your life and your thoughts

Does any of this math add up for your nonprofit organization?

Some bloggers question whether setting “rules” for social media misses the point.

Tell us what you think.

Databases rarely engender feelings of excitement or empowerment but Ushahidi, a crowd-sourcing tool developed as an open-source platform to map reports of violence in Kenya, is doing just that.

As described in the New York Times, Ushahidi is being used by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an advocacy group dedicated to reducing accidents at Louisiana refineries, to collect and log reports of the effects of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  It relies on witnesses to self-report via tweets, texts, e-mails and online submissions spill-related damage.

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