I love social media. I love it for its potential to bring people together. I love it for its potential to help us make the world a better place.

Take the earthquake in Haiti for example, people from all over the world rallied via social media – on Twitter and Facebook in particular – to help people in Haiti.

The possibilities (especially for emergency relief organizations) are quite exciting. Not surprisingly there’s a growing sense from senior non-profit professionals – fundraisers in particular – that they need to be in this new space. But how? How do they get there? What happens next?

My experience of social media is that it can be a warm and helpful environment – full of knowledge sharing – particularly in my chosen field. In January of 2009 I joined Twitter. After a few admittedly frustrated posts, I uttered the following to the Twitter-verse:

“Still finding it difficult to follow this twitter thing”

That’s when things changed and Twitter began to unveil its possibilities.

A few seasoned tweeters offered me words of encouragement. One even went so far as to offer to help me in person! A short week later, fellow fundraiser Laurie Pringle (@lauriepringle) – who I had only met on Twitter and never in person – was kind enough to come to my office to help me set up a system to manage and help make sense of it all.

It only took an hour and that was it, I was a Twitter convert. Thank you Laurie!

In the months that followed I learned about hashtags, @symbols, re-tweets, #followfridays, direct messages, lists, mentions etc. I found many interesting people in my sector to follow. I sent more tweets. I even made some new and very interesting friends in my field.

Who can predict where this brave new world will lead us? What will be interesting, however, is how non-profits will harness the energy and power of this emerging digital space…

If you want to be in social media and you’re interested in a practical approach to social media, Laurie Pringle will be hosting a session entitled: “Lay Your Hands on Me: A Hands-on Tutorial for the Social Media Starter” (Session G-09) at this Year’s AFP Congress in Toronto. Check it out!