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.

This is the first of an occasional PICnet blog series: Project Management Quick Tip. These quick tips are lessons that we Project Managers have learned in our work to keep things on time, on budget, and most importantly, to make sure that we have happy clients.

We, the PICnet Project Management team, may not be perfect but we are constantly pursuing greatness - yes, greatness! We offer these tips from lessons learned in that pursuit.

Here's our first quick tip that will hopefully help you in your own project management work:

Develop a start and end of the week (and day) routine

As the nation's capital cleans up from the weekend's Inaugural festivities, it's worth asking how we got here:

How was it that President Obama came to be standing on the steps of the Capitol being sworn for a second term rather than his rival, Governor Mitt Romney, being sworn in for his first?

One undeniable factor was that Obama's Digital Team ran one of the most successful online campaigns ever.

Curious about how?

If you're a member organization looking to offer tasty content for a members-only area, we offered a tantalizing idea on Friday for providing logged in users access to private contact information of other members in Salesforce. A valuable service to your members with no additional website management for you.

Today is the same song different verse, this one to the tune of the cash register.

If you collect dues and track them in Salesforce, you've got a pile of valuable data about the times your members have rung the cash register.

Add value to your members-only area by providing logged in users a list of their past payments. Include amounts and dates. Let them know when their membership expires. All through integrating your website with your Salesforce instance.