With so many great sessions on-tap for Dreamforce 2013 next month, we were a bit overwhelmed in choosing the sessions our team will be attending.  The Dreamforce agenda tool is fantastic, but we needed something a little more straight-forward to see a high-level overview of all the sessions in one spreadsheet.

So, we're pleased to present our Dreamforce 2013 Non-Profit Sessions spreadsheets.  It includes every non-profit session, listings by speakers (we wanted to make sure to catch our buddies on stage), and a listing of the meet-ups.  Enjoy!

On Thursday last week, Twitter, the company that lead the world in an effort to compress text communications into 140-character snippets, announced their newest way to miniaturize human communication:  6 second videos.  Their new service, called Vine, makes it very easy to create extremely short video clips on a mobile device and then instantly share them with the world on the Twitter network.

Unlike the longer video clips that you're probably producing and then distributing via other channels such as YouTube or Vimeo, Twitter purposefully intends to make you focus on getting to the point very, very fast.  Your video displays directly within your Tweet, and directly within your Twitter stream.  The videos you produce on Vine loop, and for those that remember the good old days of Web 1.0, definitely have a feeling of the animated GIF returning to popular culture.  Twitter describes Vine like this:

Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger. They're little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They're quirky, and we think that's part of what makes them so special.

As communication professionals trying to move supporters and donors up the ladder of engagement, how might Vine be useful for your online communication strategies?  Here's a few ideas that could be useful for organizations starting to explore the benefits of these short video clips.

When we started PICnet back in 2001 (well, technically in 1999 over pizza near UCLA, but lest I digress), we made a decision early on that set the tone for our company moving forward:  if we can aim to crush inefficiencies in non-profits, maybe, just maybe, we can help our social sector move towards improved outcomes that can lead to a more just and peaceful world.

Pretty lofty stuff, right?

What I think is most interesting, however, is that we were talking about increasing operational efficiency for organizations as a tech startup growing at the height of the dot-com boom.  That was quite different from what other Web development firms were doing back then, most of which was pitching hip things you can do with a Flash-based website, imploring the need to invest deep 5-digit budgets into shiny bells and whistles for websites, and encouraging the building of custom or proprietary software.

So when Nancy Schwartz, publisher of the Getting Attention blog, shared her request for feedback on this year's Nonprofit Blog Carnival, I thought it would be good for us at PICnet to share one of our dreams for the social sector in 2013.

1 day left! Pls submit by 1/28 What's your big dream for 2013? Share your vision for change goo.gl/cxmgi #NonprofitBlogCarnival

— Nancy Schwartz (@NancySchwartz) January 27, 2013

Incredibly enough, in a few weeks, our company PICnet will be 12 years old.  Considering that the idea for it started during a student government campaign at UCLA in May 1999, I've been working at the same job for almost 14 years.  To put that in perspective, on average, most folks in my generation are on their fourth job at this point in life.

I've experienced it all in growing a small business, as most boot-strappers have before me. From the soaring to the highest of highs, to the falling to the lowest of lows.  Through the process, I've learned more than I ever could have imagined about business, but more importantly, about the relationships you build with others that keep you moving forward.  I'm so incredibly thankful to have been blessed with such a great support network of people that truly care about me.

As I say quite often, the relationships we build are more important than the tools we build.

But even with friends, family, and loved ones there to support you, few, if any, really understand what is running through that entrepreneurial head of yours.  No matter how fantastic your business is doing, as an entrepreneur, you're always working harder than you were the day before.  Running through our minds is often the quote from Andy Grove:  "only the paranoid survive."

If you're a fellow entrepreneur, or you're getting ready to venture off into the startup of your own business, I have one small bit of advice for you.  Don't go it alone.  Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not speaking about your business partner decision.  I'm talking about starting right now, today, your very own entrepreneurial social safety net.

In the past few months at PICnet, we've been focusing heavily on increasing our marketing efforts, particularly through our blog.  Just as we do for most top-level programs, we've set goals, take regular measurements, analyze the results in detail, the rinse and repeat.  Our tool of trade for building our metrics for success is Google Analytics, and it's been serving us amazingly well.

As we're seeing further increases in traffic, we're interested in knowing what people were searching when they found our site.  Knowing that information allows us to better define our content strategies for the future, and give us a sense of what content is most interesting to those searching for answers online.

It seems, however, that the most popular search keyword, by huge margins, is "(not provided)".  And when I say huge margins, I mean it's 58x more popular a keyword than number two.  What is this "(not provided)" keyword in Google , and why are we getting so much traffic from it?