When the holidays roll around and people gather for good food, there is sure to be at least one person with a camera taking photos of everyone. If you are one such person, please note that taking snaps of the little ones (children and pets) requires a little more thought and planning than with grown-ups. Getting adults coordinated for a posed shot is difficult enough. With children and animals, it is more a fast shutter finger and luck that gets the little guys in a good pose. For the photos to turn out well, you need to be sure the shot is properly framed. Here are some key points that you must keep in mind as you photograph them:

Fifteen little old minutes per day: That is all you need to start your social media campaign. When it comes to maintaining your social media profile, it is more important to spend some time each day on this task than to have gaps of days and then make a lot of changes at once. Creating a regular schedule makes your campaign part of your daily routine, as well as part of the daily routine for your followers. Over a matter of days, your followers will grow in number, as will their participation.

All you need to do is pick one and only one social media site, and update it for thirty days in a row. Are you ready for the challenge?

Your charity pitches fundraising campaigns to potential donors. How do you get them as energized about your campaign as you are?

Donors look for some key information about a campaign before donating: Story, Cost, Results.

Ten years ago or more, branding was limited to an organization name, logo, and advertising. Branding is a way for customers to identify your organization in comparison to the competition. It gives your customers consistency and familiarity to keep them coming back to you. By having so many competing organizations in your industry, you have an opportunity to stand apart from them. A good branding strategy looks at the products and services you offer, your target audience, your competitive advantages, and delivers a succinct identity that represents that message. These basic concepts of branding apply today, but as usual get more involved and integrated with the rest of your business planning strategy.

In 2010, Facebook released its EdgeRank algorithm to the public. It is similar to Google's PageRank, a numerical weighting system for determining a document's relative importance when compared with other like documents. Facebook also strives to promote information that is more relevant to you. Higher relevance promotes greater use and stickiness to the Facebook site, which increases the likelihood of raised profits for the company. EdgeRank uses a simple algorithm, and we will explore its concepts to show how you can integrate the same methods for your own advertising.

Recaptcha images are supposed to be an easy way for web sites to verify that humans, not computer programs are using their online services. Most sites that implement Recaptcha do so for forms processing to ensure the ones filling out a form are actual human beings. It also protects web services from being used by automated computer programs to copy more of your work, or put an excess burden of traffic on your website. It was a good concept, but the implementation of the Recaptcha system may prevent your potential customers from using that service as well.

One of the benefits of social media marketing is experiencing your message increasing exponentially past your initial audience. Your audience will be comprised of people with differing vocal aptitude. Comprising your audience are the silent majority, vocal minority, and social authority. Understanding the differences will help you target the message appropriately.

There are going to be hurdles in devising a social media strategy. Thinking about the trouble spots will help you plan on overcoming them when they arise. Keeping documentation of contingency plans will provide you with actions to take from a cool and considered frame of mind, instead of from the panicked fray of mid-crisis. More thoughtful planning in addressing challenges will result in better outcomes.

Your budget is a reference document to control your social media strategy. Social media options are vast and varied and can consume your budget easily if proper precautions are not adhered. Defining your budgetary constraints and tracking them closely will focus your strategy on meeting your goals. See this worksheet for a guide to developing your budget.

By following these guidelines, you can control your media strategy.

Once you have assessed your current state of affairs, your next step is to define goals that your social media campaign will meet. Setting goals is a tricky process. You must place the level of difficulty for obtaining that goal just far enough to be challenging, without being unobtainable.

When too many goals are set too low, your charity's growth will not be as great. Sure you meet every objective set, but lowering the bar to an assured success does not fulfill your team with achievement. Setting your goals too low over time decreases the amount of involvement your employees and donors stake with your charity. When fewer resources are involved in obtaining the goal, you will be at risk of closing yourself from potential opportunities. More aggressive charities may whisk away donors that may have otherwise contributed to your cause. Funds or other opportunities may pass you by for those charities that are more vigorous.

When too many goals are set too high and your cause does not attain them, morale of your employees and donors may diminish. Everyone likes a winner. When you do not achieve a goal you have set, you can congratulate yourself for the degree of success that you did achieve. Take the defeat as a teachable moment. Promise yourself for the next goal, set your sites a little lower to increase your chance of success.

In order to know what you want to do with social media, you must first determine where your charity stands right now. If you do not have a business plan, you must create one. If you have not reviewed your business plan recently, you should review and update it. Only by knowing the current status of your charity can you determine where to steer it.

Professional libraries of well-lit, properly focused and cropped images that can be cheap to purchase would seem like an enticing option. By flipping through a few pages, you can find images that help project the scene and attitude of your copy. Just purchase a few photos and paste them on your page, and your done. What's not to love?

Misusing stock photos can actually hurt your corporate image.

Adding these images to your website, brochures, and other promotional material can elevate the professional image of your organization. When not done properly, it can make your company image look schlocky, impersonal, or even temporary. Follow these considerations to determine if and when to incorporate a library of stock images in your marketing campaigns.

This is what democracy looks like!" You can hear this chant and many others at the Occupy marches around the world. The assembly of large quantities of people is promoting communication that otherwise would not have occurred. People are exchanging new ideas and teaching the use of previously-proven concepts (like non-violent protest) from previous protest movements. They are taking mobile communication beyond the realm of obligatory social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Both low-tech and high-tech approaches to information exchange are getting a facelift from this movement. Investment in improving upon and delivering this communication technology is becoming the next cottage industry.

Whatever your opinion of the Occupy protests, we are all benefiting from the advancements in communication that are coming out of this movement. "The whole world is watching."

This time of year, charities receive a greater influx of donations than they normally do at other times of the year. Donors are buying gifts for friends and family, and continue the giving spirit with their favorite charities. Financial advisers review clients' accounts to see what tax benefits their clients can receive with an offset of donations to 501(c)(3) charities.

Good manners demand that charities send thank you letters to the donors recognizing their donations. This administrative requirement can take a lot of time to generate. How does a charity efficiently organize their thank you letters and send them out?

Quick Response Codes (QR codes) are gaining more prominence in marketing and ad space. These codes provide you with a hyperlink that takes you to a web page for more information about the product or service. Every avenue for print media is an opportunity to embellish the experience with multimedia web content. Think of the possibilities of reducing printing costs: Instead of taking up room in print for detailed information, adding a QR code will get the information to the potential customers at a fraction of the ad space.

Think of your audience. Know your demographic before implementing this rising trend.

You sign up for a newsgroup, or make a purchase online, on a website you have never used previously. The website needs to know who you are, so it asks for you to create a new account, consisting of at least a new user name and a password. If you have a hard enough time remembering where you left your keys in the morning, there is a good chance that remembering user names and passwords to your 50 most favorite websites is too much to ask. If you do have a way of remembering 50 unique user names and passwords (writing them on a sticky note taped to your monitor is not the most secure way of remembering your passwords), many of these websites will have faults in the secure storage of your information, making a unique user name and password nigh worthless. Passwords can be stored in plain text, meaning that anyone who can access the database can read your user name and password (and can likely guess what user name and password you may use for the other 49 websites you log into). Some websites may store your password in an encrypted form, but have an algorithm to revert the password to plain text; if there is a way to make the password human readable, it is a favorite target of hackers. Try clicking on the "Forgot Password" prompt of the websites you access. If they email you the password you used to create your account, then that website would have used either of these two methods to store your private information. No matter how creative your password, it is no longer secure. There is hope in the realm of security to keep the number of user names and passwords you use to a minimum while trusting that they will be stored securely.

The Baby Boomers have been referred as the pig in the python. The large bulge in the age demographics has necessitated ingenuity and advancement in social, economic, political, and geographic movements. To facilitate the spike in numbers of this age group, families moved to the first suburban neighborhoods, experienced an economic boom as manufacturing and marketing moved goods into those homes, and spurred a political and environmental consciousness that challenged the status quo. As Baby Boomers reach retirement, the need to share their great wealth of knowledge amongst the younger generations is tantamount for sustaining and even advancing what we know. It is only fitting that Knowledge Management has advanced to a level for effectively capturing that knowledge, via the semantic web.

Tim Bernars-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web (a.k.a., The Web), has spent three decades defining the standards that bring us web pages on our computers and mobile devices. Since his initial proposal in March 1989, The Web has evolved from displaying read-only documents to the interactive social-networking websites we use today. One of the driving technologies of The Web is HTML. It takes these web documents and presents the information in a readable form on your screen with which you can interact. This information is designed specifically to be human-readable. The volume of data on The Web has grown to such a degree as to necessitate computers to read these documents and try to understand its content as closely to a human as possible. Enter the Semantic Web.

A client of mine asked me how to start a blog and make money with it. Unfortunately, you will not gain instant success overnight. It takes time to develop a writing style for your blog, a depth of topics to write, and to gain momentum with a readership. If you go to any of the popular, ready-made blog websites out there (e.g., Blogger, WordPress, etc.), they can show the mechanics on how to set up your own blogspace. The tips in this blog will prepare you mentally and train you to write a blog.

Search engines are the dynamos that drive traffic to websites. For them to drive traffic to your website, you must first understand how they find your website and include it in search results. Search engines, like Google and Yahoo, typically find out about your website if another website they are currently crawling links to your website. With the blossoming of social networking, you can create a page on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networking site and invite your friends to join and subscribe to those pages. On these social networking sites, link back to key pages to your website that you wish to promote. Make sure your links accurately reflect the content on the pages to which you are linking. The text of the link should describe the contents of the target page. Keep these social networking sites public so the search engines can find them and link back to your website pages. The search engines will then be able to find your website and crawl its contents.