Um, Seth? Gotta disagree, bro.

That's it. I've had it.

I'm might as well pack it all in. I'm washed up, useless, worthless, and not fit to have the word "online" in my job title.

According to this post by Seth Godin (who, btw, I've been a fan of since his "Permission Marketing" book in the go-go early dot.com days), the nonprofit I work for is a failure, because it is not in the top 100 Twitter users in terms of followers. And it is my job to develop our social networking outreach strategy. #fail!

Really, Seth? This is how you measure the effectiveness of nonprofits? Really?

I can't think of a more insipid criteria to measure whether a nonprofit is adverse to change or not, or has an effective communications strategy. Here's why:

1. Nonprofits are adverse to change? Maybe, and to varying degrees some more than others, but isn't everyone? When's the last time you brought home a different brand of toothpaste without someone in your household complaining? Big business, government, manufacturing are all resistant to change (well said, CauseWired.)
   
   
2. Nonprofits have to be good stewards. If NPO's changed their strategy every time the blogosphere got all hot and bothered about the next new thing, we'd all be holding virtual events in Second Life. We owe some caution-before-action to our donors and to those we serve by our mission. We should not be first in the pool. We should at least make sure it is full of water before diving in.
   
   
3. Free is so not free. Managing social networking sites takes staff time - a luxury most nonprofits do not have. At my org, we are fortunate to have 1.5 people managing our social networking profiles (in addition to managing a host of other things, of course), but I know how lucky we are. You have to devote time to it to do it well.
   
   
4. Top 100 on Twitter. Notice anything about what those folks have in common? Most of them don't have day jobs! Or at least not 9-5 jobs. They are celebrities. And many have a staff of people to either tweet for them or ply them with content. They are free to tweet on about the particularities of their day and it is still going to be more widely read than anything I could possibly post about the amazing work my NPO does. God that's depressing.
   
   
5. Shouldn't quality of followers matter? Here's the deal. We're selective. Here's why: We actually use our Twitter channel to listen. I scan our followers' tweets quite a bit. Not just when they mention us, but their everyday tweets. Why? Because I actually want to know, what are they interested in? What types of posts are they retweeting? Are our followers more liberal or more conservative? It's fascinating. But I don't want to wade through pages and pages of followers telling me how to "Get more followers instantly" or "Check out my barely legal photos." So we screen new followers, and if they are spammers, we block them. You can't tell me Ashton screens all 3 million + of his followers.
   

Seth, I'm sorry; I have to call you out on this one. You've got it all wrong.