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Social media is clearly the now, and building online communities for business and personal connections is necessarily the future. But anecdotally at least I can report more picking and choosing on which networks for what, largely due to three vital influencers — time, intent and strategy.

Which raises the question — was the heavy uptick in social media sites during the first part of 2009 due to the “what’ll we do now?” panic-er-resettling following the recession’s impact on business and nonprofits? No measurement authorities have delivered the data that fully jives with our observations (and we are remaining open-minded), but this “Inside Twitter” report provides credible validation of what we’re seeing in our professional networks’ behaviors and day to day conversations with colleagues.

Thanks to Rohit Bhargava’s Influential Marketing Blog, the report’s key findings came to our attention:

• 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day.
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet.
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity.
• New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009.

Back to the basics. Innovation is vital and keeping pace is life-saving. But clients are still reeling from the whammy that’s struck them with this economy. More than ever, our marketing advice should continue to be built on strategy and proven outcomes, not what’s cool or the latest techie fad. We all have to choose — or we will be simply wasting our creative energy and potential profits as we spin into cyberspace without connecting meaningfully with our markets. Wherever your audience is interacting online, that’s where you should be.

Planned giving in this volatile economy has new-found potential for longer-term institutional investment and growth in nonprofit organizations strapped for cash in the short term. You can find the details and data in this metrics-based analysis, which I wrote with the planned giving specialists at Marts & Lundy, a leading philanthropic consulting firm.  Use the free login-in to access the indepth report, “Making the Sense of Planned Giving Metrics: Advancing the Dialogue About What Really Counts.”

Nonprofit technology expert and educator John Kenyon made the power of social media a more accessible concept when he presented at our consultants network of the Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership of Marin County. “Making Web 2.0 Work for You” began with the “Conversation” prism, Brian Solis’  iconic visual that neatly frames “the art of social media listening, learning and sharing.”

And he made really clear that a website and email communications are the foundation of any strategy, with email still the “killer app.” For fundamentals, that means that your chances to build relationships are only as good as your email list — eg, your audience database.

John’s big themes for any social media strategy:

• Start with your needs — who is your audience and where do they “live” online?
• Find people who are passionate about your causes (through Technorati and Google Alerts).
• Grow people’s awareness and familiarity with your cause, and own the search engines! (Google Adwords, Blogging).
• Amplify word of mouth and grow your email list (YouTube and Flickr).
• Plug your supporters into fundraising widgets (ChipIn.org, SixDegrees.org, Change.org).
• Go where people are and tap into user participation (Facebook).
• Inspire people to visit your website and engage with you.

How to know if you’re headed in the right direction? Since Web 2.0 is still the “Wild West,” there are no industry-wide benchmarks and not a lot of data. So start with measuring ROI against your organization’s goals, not goals that other organizations have.

Check out this ebook, Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission, which John, Beth Kanter and other nonprofit technology gurus have just published. They’ll all be at the national Nonprofit Technology Conference, sponsored by the pace-setting Nonprofit Technology Network NTEN in San Francisco, April 26-28.