Being social is nothing new to non-profit organizations like GuluWalk. Online fundraising is of growing importance to charities of all sizes as it has the ability to turn supporters into fundraisers. (more…)

Brands that classify themselves as having a non-traditional market, yet are looking for greater participation, support or involvement can still use social media strategies to attract online communities. They just need to make themselves accessible. (more…)

A European political movement is asking its supporters to support its efforts by designing advertisements for the campaign. The Libertas party is hoping to be the first pan-European party to run candidates in all member states of the European Union. It wants to change the European Union (EU) fundamentally to give more power back to the participating countries. The website that is allowing users to create their own ads is UK built micro-site called ThisAd. (more…)

One tweet from a National Hockey League (NHL) employee mentioning the play-off launch party at the NHL store in downtown New York inspired hockey fans all over North America to host their own tweetup events. This single tweet was retweeted and was eventually noticed by hockey fans from Atlanta to Edmonton who wanted in on the action.

In total, 21 cities held tweetup playoff celebration parties. One user created a website, NHLTweetup.com, to
help users find and promote the tweetup in their area. (more…)

After this week’s town hall meeting with President Barack Obama, viewers would have been excused to think that the most burning questions in America are over the legalization of marijuana.

Barack Obama held its first ever online town hall meeting this week, where The White House asked Americans to submit questions that they would like to have answered by the President. The White House received more than 100,000 questions and more than 3.5 million votes on which of those questions should be asked. True to his word, he answered the most popular questions including the query asking if he felt that legalizing marijuana would help stimulate the economy. (more…)

President Barack Obama released a video on the White House YouTube channel this week that wishes the people of the world, especially Iran, a happy new year. This is the same type of social media that President Obama used in his campaign for the Presidency so it’s not surprising he’s turned to it again to spread his new foreign policy.

The video is titled “A New Year, A new Beginning” and runs approximately three and a half minutes with captions in Farsi. Obama begins by addressing the whole world and those who celebrate Nowruz, or “New Day”. He then changes pace and expresses his special wishes for the people of Iran. The President talks about how he would like to see relations between the countries improved in the future. (more…)

President Barack Obama has a history of inspiring user-generated (UGC) content and his trip to Canada was no different. In his first international visit Obama spent just over seven hours in Canada. Before Air Force One left the Ottawa airport, UGC related to his visit was all over the Internet.

Many images of the president’s motorcade were posted within minutes of Obama landing on Canadian soil. Flickr had pictures posted of the Parliament Hill crowd gathering even before Obama showed up. This is not new for Obama, both his inauguration and election night spawned record breaking amounts of UGC and television viewership. (more…)

TNT Sports’ NBA All-Star game website incorporated Facebook status updates on its website this year so fans could chat and comment throughout the game.

This was part of a bigger campaign by TNT and the NBA to engage viewers during the All-Star festivities. During the skills competition, viewers got to decide who won the slam-dunk competition by texting in who they thought performed the best. On the website TNT asked who the fans would like to see the cameras follow during the All-Star game. Viewers on the website have a choice of a number of different camera angles and can even watch up to four cameras at once on the mosaic view. (more…)

The flood of user-generated content (UGC) that came in the wake of Tuesday’s inauguration ceremony was astonishing, especially if you consider how undeveloped social media applications were the last time the U.S. capital staged an inauguration just four years ago. Facebook and MySpace, for example, had much smaller numbers of users and Twitter didn’t even exist.

From the number of online campaigns that were run leading up to the inauguration, to the traffic on the sites that streamed the event, to the status updates and wall posts, yesterday might have been the busiest day in online history.  (more…)

For all the possibility, neither CNN’s iReport nor NowPublic managed to get much (or any) live photos or videos from the inauguration. NowPublic was even cooperating with Qik to permit live streaming video from camera phones, but only a few posts actually made it to either site during the new President’s speech and many of those were of people viewing the event on television.

Maybe everyone was just too wrapped up in listening to a stirring speech, or maybe the data networks were jammed. We’ll check back later to see what gets posted.

UPDATE: Here’s a streaming video of the inauguration filed on Qik. It sure gives you a sense of what it must have been like to be there watching the event, standing shoulder to shoulder with over one million people.