I've been spending some time watching this video on YouTube.

It's long, and it is really really good. I suggest you pour a cup of coffee and watch it.

The Los Angeles Times has posted a recent investigation in which they uncover the surprising disparity between the money raised by fundraisers and that distributed to charities.

In more than 5,800 campaigns on behalf of charities that were registered with the state attorney general from 1997 to 2006, the fundraisers reported taking in $2.6 billion. They kept nearly $1.4 billion -- about 54 cents of every dollar raised.

That's pretty poor ROI, but even worse are some of the study's other findings.

• More than 100 charities raised $1 million or more from commercial appeals but netted less than 25 cents per dollar. Fundraisers got the rest.
• In 430 campaigns, charities got nothing: All $44 million donated went to fundraisers. In 337 of those cases, charities actually lost money, paying fees to fundraisers that exceeded the amount raised.
• In hundreds of other campaigns, charities apparently entered into contracts that limited their share of donations to 20% or less, no matter how successful the campaign.
• Groups with strong emotional or patriotic appeal -- those supporting animals, children, veterans and public safety workers, for instance -- often fared worst. Missing-children charities received less than 15% of more than $28 million raised on their behalf.

To help, they have created an online tool that analyzes data supplied by the State of California. From this, the tool creates a matrix from Low Return, Low Revenue to High Return, High Revenue. You can use this tool when determining where you might want to flex your donations.

The LA Times Charity Fundraising Database

Monday I had a conversation with Andrew about when we should start formally building the Remarkd community. My point was that I already had. We launched new content last week, and as soon as I had verified that the links worked, @remarkd sent out a big shout which I promptly re-tweeted. This is the way we do things.

With the science of GOOG Analytics, I have verified that the largest number of clickthru referrals for our site were from StumbleUpon & Twitter. In terms of the most content viewed (as in: hit the homepage and then dug around a bit), Twitter wins hands down. I am speculating, but I think the StumbleUpon reference may even have come from a tweet source.

What does this mean?

Use of social media drives traffic, regardless of the state of "content readiness". Part of what drives traffic in my case is a constant, diversified use of social media on a daily basis. By diversified, I mean that I use it for research, communication, sharing, insight, intelligence, kudos, fun, presence ... I actually make an effort to integrate my use of social media into my life. This doesn't have to be odd or occasional or asocial, it just becomes a thing you do, and in doing so, you build community

So when I reach out and tell my community what I'm doing, they value the fact that I am engaging them. I've made them laugh & think, I've helped them with their jobs & I've supported them in times of need. They're my peeps and when I ask them to, they bring it.

Yeah, but how does that apply to my org?

The important thing to note is that I'm not doing anything odd or special. I am simply living in the social media space in the same way that I live in my physical community. If you are open about your connection to your organization, you are your org. Being out there and active is a commitment. It means you have to be a public face, which can be challenging when you want to make that off-the-cuff comment or share something that's really TMI. Realistically, you can and will make gaffes, you just have to be human enough to accept them and fix them. As an example, this message on Twitter by @jowyang, in which he publicizes his public apology to someone (or a generation) he may have offended. That show of humility and accountability is exemplary for the public face of a brand.

What does this have to do with timing?

It's really simple to know when you start building community. You have already started. I still remember the afternoon I made the commitment to myself to make social media matter in my life. It was like a rite of passage... I suddenly saw opportunities I had previously thought were beyond my reach. I met people that inspired me and changed my perspective. It was truly one of the most righteous things I have ever done.

As you build a community of folks who trust you and consider you a valued information source, your community increases in value; it takes time to make that happen, ergo, the sooner you start the faster it will.

Photo attribution: Original photo by Flickr user Stabilo Boss.

Today I opened Transmit, renamed index.html and uploaded a whole new stack of content to remarkd.com.

This is a huge move for us, as it moves us away from the obscure language we had posted previously into what is only the beginning of an exciting transformation we've been working on for about a year. But as huge as this seems like now, what we have going on in the lab make this new content seem... well... static.

In the coming weeks you'll see a lot more activity and in shortly we'll be launching with a set of capabilities we expect will transform the way people think about giving. You can expect this blog to become a lot more active, not to mention our twitter (@remarkd) account, as we start to publish new details of our mission and offerings.

Note: This is a cross-post from my blog, serious about camo.

Between the guy getting saved by Twitter, and a good showing at SXSW this year, Twitter's been getting some very positive attention lately. In the background there are two services that I don't usually compare to Twitter: Vox and LiveJournal. I think they are interesting services to compare to Twitter, largely because they are both community-based consumer services aiming to build a broad market.

There are some very interesting things to learn about LiveJournal on its Wikipedia entry ... but I had visited that entry because I wanted to take note of the year LJ was introduced: 1999. This is the same year Blogger was introduced and is critical because I posit that LJ's unique visitor numbers (3,534,045 last month) are largely legacy users who have made significant investments in the LJ community.

Vox, like Twitter, launched in 2006 (actually I was a bit surprised to notice that Twitter pre-dated Vox by 3 months!) December 2008 was a turning point. Prior to December, Vox had enjoyed a consistent lead over Twitter in unique website visitors¹. In December, there was an user-equilibrium between Vox and Twitter. Since then, Twitter has been steadily outpacing Vox's user numbers.

A number Compete uses to track the deltas in user engagement over time.

Velocity is an effective way to measure the impact of planned (or unplanned) events, such as new advertising campaigns, product/service launches or general site growth. Simply choose an event date as the starting point to see how it has affected a site's Attention over time.

Something really interesting happened on March 26, 2008. Twitter suddenly had net-positive Velocity. If you know what it was, let me know. CC Chapman suggested it might have been SXSW, but I'm not sure. Whatever the reason, since then Twitter has been using

A velocity turning point

¹ - Twitter's API and integration with SMS and Jabber make it a real challenge to get true usage metrics on. For this reason I qualify that Compete is measuring only website visitors.