del.icio.us tags 11.22.07

Happy Thanksgiving, folks. A few links that I have tagged on del.icio.us over the past week or so. Stuff yourself.

Social Networks
Militaryplanet.com is a new social network for members of the military -- past and present. According to the press release quoted by 901am, the site was developed in part due to the military's decision to ban service members from using other social networking sites like MySpace. If anyone has the chance to check it out, I would be interested in hearing about the size of the community, the conversation and the features.

Digital Advocacy
Witness has launched "The Hub." The aim of the site is to allow individuals and groups to gather attention to human rights issues around the world by posting video, audio and photos; sharing educational and advocacy materials and to connect with others who are concerned about human rights violations. The site is in beta and, according to their "about" page, Witness has a number of additonal features that they will be rolling out on the Hub in the near future. They're looking for ideas and volunteers, so consider giving them some of your time.

Change.org has launched a social network for nonprofits and their supporters on its site. Nonprofit groups can use their profile to raise money, post videos and photos, list calls for action and blog; while visitors to the site can sign up as a supporter, review, share their desire for "change," or comment on the nonprofit. (Thanks to TechCrunch for the news.) So, do you think these nonprofit organizations have a bigger impact on sites like Change, where people are coming because they already care about the issues, or on sites like Facebook, where the reach may be broader, but the users may not have changing the world on their mind?

Janet Meiners at Marketing Pilgrim covers new research from the Center for Marketing Research that says that a larger percentage of nonprofit organizations than businesses are using social media. Almost half of the nonprofits in Forbes' list of the top 200 charities say that they use social media as part of their fundraising efforts. What is it that puts nonprofits out front? Is it their need to utilize communication tools that raise awareness without raising their budgets? Is it about being less concerned about the impact of transparency? Is it the age of the folks running nonprofit organizations? In her comments, Janet indicates that she thinks the justification is money, while others suggest that it is passion and simply the respond to a demand from an increasingly socially conscious public that is putting nonprofits on the cutting edge.

Politics
Compete has announced the launch of Candidate Facetime, their solution for measuring the effectiveness of presidential candidates' efforts to reach voters via social media. The metric used is the amount of time spent on each candidate's official web site. I guess, in the end, that's where the candidates want voters to end up (ideally, to make a donation), but what about the time spent with the candidates elsewhere within social media? Is it that they don't think it is as valuable or is it just too difficult to measure? What about a metric that combined time on the candidate's web site with the volume of conversation about that conversation within social media, along with their search visibility and links into their official sites? Any other metrics worth considering?

Search
Searchboth.com lets you search both Google and Yahoo, Expedia and Orbitz or YellowPages.com and SuperPages.com at the same time in order to compare results.

Health
I'm not sure how long it has been around, but DiabeTeens is a community site for young people with diabetes over at HealthCentral.com.

The Ladies
I'm not thrilled about it, but, according to Comscore (and Mashable), CafeMom is the number one destination for women online. (I'm not thrilled because I think most marketers presume that women are mothers or want to be mothers and seem to forget that those of us who don't fall into that group probably have a little disposable cash that they might want to get their hands on.)

Worldwide, more than 2/3 of Facebook users are women. In the U.S., 60 percent of Facebook users are women. (Thanks to TechCrunch, once again.)