Like it or not, Twitter use continues to surge. Twitter is averaging 230 million tweets per day, up 110 percent January 2011. Over 55 percent of active users contribute tweets from a smartphone or other mobile device. So it’s not going away. Here are a few tidbits to help drill down a little deeper:

Most Twitter users are minorities. In November 2011 the racial divide was 8 percent — 13 percent African-American versus 5 percent white. One in 10 African-American Internet users visit Twitter every day, double the rate of Latinos and nearly four times the rate for whites, according to Pew.

There are also more older adults adopting Twitter than ever before: those in the 30-49 year old bracket doubled to 14 percent from 7 percent last November.

And for kicks, here are some random facts proving that the rich and famous love to tweet: Twitter users include 75 percent of the NBA’s players, 50 percent of the NFL, 82 percent of the U.S. House and 85 percent of the Senate; 87 percent of the Billboard Top 100 Musicians, and 93 percent of the top Food Network chefs.

Groundwire recently surveyed its clients and followers to identify common email broadcasting trends in the nonprofit sector.  Here is some of what they discovered:

Time Investment: Like anything worth doing, good email communications programs take a fair bit of time to execute well. Preparation of content and troubleshooting of formatting problems are the two major contributors to the time crunch. On average it takes 3 people 5.9 hours to create, test, and deliver 4 email messages per month to a list of about 6300 subscribers. Therefore, in general, expect to spend about 23.6 hours per month running your email communications program.

Groundwire asked how strongly respondents agree with this statement: “In general, do you feel that you are given adequate time in your job role to prepare and send email communication”. The responses were:

• Strongly Agree – 31.9%
• Agree Somewhat – 41.5%
• Disagree Somewhat – 17.0%
• Strongly Disagree – 9.6%

Some of the optional responses to this question are quite interesting. For example:

• “Impact of email marketing not given high enough value internally, despite being the channel with far and away the highest ROI.”
• “The problem isn’t total time, it’s the “rush jobs” (“need it done today”) with no notice or advance planning”
• “We have made sending out our e-newsletter a communications priority. As such, we have a lot of organizational support for producing a high quality product. To streamline our process, we profile content that is on our website, then drive people to the website, significantly reducing the time spent on the e-newsletter”

Problems: The majority of responders (66%) said that formatting the email properly was the biggest problem they faced when trying to get an email newsletter or alert out the door. Many layout problems can only be solved through analyzing the underlying HTML or through lots of trial and error. A solid understanding of HTML is an essential skill for successful email communication.

The second major blocker on email was simply getting the content written (35%). Content (especially quality content) takes time to develop. It’s part of the cost of doing business and is fundamental to being successful online. Hire a staff writer or allocate the responsibility to someone who shows writing talent on staff and you’ll see the benefits of good copy working for you.

Service Providers: Here is a list of the top 4 service providers the responders said they are using:

• VerticalResponse
• ConstantContact
• CampaignMonitor
• WhatCounts

Benefits of Email Communication: The final question in the survey asked responders to list some of the benefits of having an email communication program. The question as stated was – “What are the most important benefits of mass email to your organization? What goal(s) does it help you accomplish?” Common responses were:

• Communication with supporters/members and donors
• Getting the word out on programs and events
• Easy method to deliver important messages
• Driving traffic to the website
• Fundraising

David Pogue, technology critic at the New York Times, has put together a “handy clip-and-save” primer on social networking.  It’s for those who know little about Web 2.0 — or as Pogue writes: Those that Facebook left behind. Here are the key sections:

FACEBOOK: This is the biggest social networking service, with almost 500 million members — 22 percent of everyone on the Internet — and it’s growing by 5 percent a month.

It’s a glorified “facebook”— name-and-photo directory — of the sort that colleges distribute to incoming freshmen. (In fact, Facebook started out exactly that way, as an electronic facebook at Harvard.) You answer as many questions about yourself as you feel comfortable sharing: your name, contact information, relationship status, favorite music and maybe a few photos. Then you search for friends, past or present. When they accept your friend invitations, you can now see their Facebook pages and they can see yours.

Why you’d bother: Facebook is great for sharing news, photos and videos with people who might care; for finding long-lost friends (or snooping on old lovers); for joining groups that support various causes or interests; for sending messages (it’s somewhat more streamlined than regular e-mail); and for playing games with each other (FarmVille, Mafia Wars).

Why not: Facebook keeps making policy and programming blunders that expose personal information to other Web sites. It also lets its advertisers place ads on the pages of very targeted members: divorced 45-year-olds in Texas, for example.

Similar: MySpace (a teenage and preteenage crowd, heavily focused on pop music and do-it-yourself page designs), Bebo and many others.

LINKEDIN: It’s Facebook for the professional set. Here, the concept is establishing a “who you know” network of current and former business colleagues.

Why you’d bother: LinkedIn is especially useful when you’re looking for a new job — or a new employee, which helps explain its 70-million-strong global membership — because you’re no longer limited to asking your immediate colleagues for referrals. Now you can ask colleagues of colleagues, which greatly expands your reach. LinkedIners can also vouch for one another as references.

A popular feature called Answers lets you ask business-related questions of people who might know — advice on everything from résumé formatting to business software.

Why not: As with Facebook, not all connections are legitimate. When people accept “friend” invitations from people they don’t actually know, the whole trusted-colleague concept weakens.

TWITTER: This is the service that lets you send tweets — er, brief, 140-character updates that feel a lot like text messages. They can be news, jokes, observations, links, gripes, questions, anything.

Except instead of sending them to just one person’s cellphone, you’re sending them to a handful, or thousands — as many as have signed up to receive them from you. Meanwhile, you’ve signed up to receive other people’s postings (to “follow” them). Once you’ve signed up for a few good ones, the messages scroll up your screen, like the transcript of a global cocktail-party conversation.

You can use Twitter on its Web site, but it’s much easier if you do it using a free Twitter-reading app for your computer or phone, like TweetDeck, Twitterific and Twitter (the official Twitter app for the iPhone, formerly called Tweetie).

Why you’d bother: News frequently breaks on Twitter (by being passed around so fast that pretty soon, everybody’s heard it). It’s fun to follow famous people; the stuff they (or their minions) type appears directly on your phone or computer screen, without any layers of interpreters in between.

Using search.twitter.com, you can find out what the world is saying about you, your company or any topic that interests you.

And if enough people, or the right people, follow you, you can get something truly revolutionary: expert, instantaneous feedback on questions or opinions.

Why not: Twitter can be a lonely place when you first sign up. Figuring out whom to follow, and how to get people to follow you, takes time and effort. And Twitterites use a lot of conventions and shorthand codes that can be confusing at first.

Similar: Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Facebook updates.

FOURSQUARE: As cellphones with GPS become more popular, crazy new possibilities pop up — like Foursquare.

It knows where you are. So when you open the Foursquare app on your iPhone, Palm, BlackBerry or Android phone, you see a list of restaurants, bars and shops near where you’re standing. By “checking in” (tapping the name of the one you’re in), you broadcast your location to your friends. There’s a game element, too: you earn points whenever you check in. In fact, whoever visits a certain place the most becomes its “mayor,” and may be rewarded by a giveaway from that business.

Why you’d bother: You can see where your friends are right now, making it easy to meet them. Businesses can offer you free products as you walk by (“Since you’re right outside, how ’bout a free coffee?”) — win-win marketing. And your buddies can leave pointers about an establishment (“avoid the halibut”) that appear right on your screen as you enter. Really cool concept.

Why not: With not quite two million members — mostly bar-hopping twenty-somethings — Foursquare isn’t for everyone. Most people don’t use it, and most businesses aren’t listed yet.

Similar: Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite.

YELP: It’s a huge database of restaurants, shops, hotels, doctors, museums and attractions, all easy to find, with store hours, directions and phone numbers, covering 34 cities. But the magic is in the customer reviews: 11 million of them so far, mostly helpful and articulate.

Why you’d bother: Armed with those reviews, you have no excuse to go to a terrible restaurant or shady shop again.

Why not: There’s always a chance that the reviews are being manipulated (although the company says it’s diligent about filtering out suspicious ones).

Similar: OpenTable, Urbanspoon.

THE BOTTOM LINE: These sites all derive their power the same way: We, the people, provide the information — not the Web site owner. Some of these services establish lines of communication between people who might otherwise never meet, joining them by interest rather than geography. Others connect you with people you do know, or once knew, so that you can help each other out.

It’s getting ugly out there. Progressives around the country are struggling to respond to the escalating rhetoric  coming from the radical right, including the hanging of Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-MD) in effigy at a rally; groups of conservative activists disrupting town hall meetings; Fox News’s Glenn Beck calling on patriots to take back America while saying that President Obama hates white people.

In response, the Center for American Progress has offered up a few pointers for dealing with the right wing assault. Here are a few highlights:

• These forces are organized and driven from above: All strategies involving pushing back against these astro-turf forces should include addressing the national organizations driving the actions, not just their local tentacles. Research how they are funded, what their ultimate goals are and what means they use to engage local activists.  At the same time, it is important to ensure that local media treat the local manifestations of these groups as what they are; part of a conservative national strategy. These abusive hecklers are not local, suddenly angry people who otherwise might vote for a progressive.
• There are often strong ties to overtly racist groups: Call conservative groups on their willingness to engage with racists. Do so publicly and with the press. Make it much harder for mainstream conservatives and elected officials to rely on racist organizations to move their messages or provide foot soldiers for their campaigns.  This is not the same as saying that everyone who opposes President Obama is a racist or that everyone who is concerned about securing our border is a bigot. Lots of decent people disagree fundamentally with many of the president’s policy positions, including on immigration, energy, and health care reform. But groups with clear antipathy toward other people because of their race should not be the army on which any legitimate group moves its political agenda.
• They don’t want to have a debate, they want to shout you down: You have to know these tactics are going to happen and prepare for them. This means that every public event with an elected ally or potential ally requires a strong presence from supporters of health care reform or immigration or whatever progressive issue is under attack this week. Immigration advocates set up email lists to alert supporters whenever their voice is needed in a public meeting or even just to add their words to the comments following a news story online. Increasingly, progressive local blogs have started playing this role in the health care debate. The result: progressives have sometimes outnumbered “tea baggers” in some recent town halls.”

Right now young people rely heavily on text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, etc, instead of email, to communicate.  But as they get older will this change?  The “father of the internet” Vint Cerf expects:

today’s young people to change their behavior as they age because they’ll be maintaining different kinds of relationships then than they do now. In high school and college, young people are usually communicating with peers who are nearby and living lives with similar patterns, but as they all move into adulthood, their lives will scatter and diverge in ways that often make delayed/deferred communications more useful than immediate communications. In other words, IM’ing is great when you’re gossipping with classmates, but email may be better when you’re catching up with that friend across the country who suddenly has three kids under the age of five.

For groups hoping to maintain relationships with young people as they age out of college, start families or enter the workforce, it may be worth tracking whether aging youth’s modes of communications change over time.

I Love Mountains, a campaign by REVERB hub Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and Appalachian Voices, is using Google Earth and YouTube to vividly show the environmental degradation caused by mountaintop mining. Top of their webpage has a link “What’s My Connection to Mountaintop Removal” that allows users to type in their zip code and pull up a Google map of all the power plants in their area that use mountaintop removal–a great way to personalize a campaign.  Their YouTube page, “America’s Most Endangered Mountains Video Menu” is easy to use and is a great example of effective online storytelling.