So while I've been off twitter, I've had time to research social CRM (funny, that.) And what I've found is pretty interesting. CRM stands for "Customer Relationship Management" (not to be confused with "Cause Related Marketing"- it came from the for-profit space. In the nonprofit world we use this acronym to mean "Constituent Relationship Management", generally.

Countless nonprofits flocked to Ning to create social networks. Since I'm not a social media guru, I've generally kept my opinions about this to myself. But now that Ning isn't free anymore, I'm going to carp some. I think over the course of lo this last few years, I have blogged or tweeted about this very phenomenon what feels like countless times. Nonprofits find services for free. They start depending on them. The free services disappear, for business reasons.

Tomorrow morning, I'll be leaving on a jet plane, to Atlanta, Georgia, for the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference. This will be my 7th NTC since 2001 (or, more accurately, my 5th. I went to two Circuit Rider Roundups.) I'm looking forward to it.

As most of you know, I'm a very long time veteran of web application building. I've been involved in web application development basically since they started - when a cgi-bin folder with some perl scripts to process simple forms was the norm. Until just a few years ago, there was very little sophistication about the user experience in web applications - what mattered most was functionality.