General Website & Social Networking Presence

Love your comments. Let me tell you, I'm going to share them. We have to do a much better job of sharing our strategies. If I could offer an observation - I think we as staff shy away from participating in these forums, as we have always assumed volunteers preferred a forum to share their own thoughts.
Maybe that's no longer the right attitude.
It can be kind of daunting to jump in, particularly for people not in communications, for fear of saying the wrong thing. But I think it could be particularly helpful to have others participate - particularly the program experts who've been in Scouting much longer than I.
Cheers
Susie

You should fear silence over fear of saying the wrong thing.

If someone brings up a complaint (as this board seems to) an answer, pointed direction to look, or a "wow, never thought of that" sounds better than nothing.

Nothing seems like you don't care.

I'll link to you to what I believe in. It's the 95 theses that together are called the Cluetrain Manifesto. I Highly recommend the book, but at the very least, one should read the 95 theses.
I'll even be willing to ship you the book.

Know "The Cluetrain" well!
I'll also provide a link to a website started by a gentleman who designed the first social media conference I attended. He spoke from 9 in the morning straight through to 5 pm. I could have listened even longer. His name is Mitch Joel, and his book, "Six Pixels of Separation" is also an excellent read for those interested in the fundamentals of social media.
http://www.twistimage.com/blog/

Great discussion; keep it up! No one's yet addressed the search box issue, so I'll do so.

The National IT staff are aware of the issue when running scouts.ca on Google Chrome, and are working to correct it. I've discovered that you can use this address successfully on Chrome to search the National site: http://www.scouts.ca/search_css/search.html

If you're experiencing difficulties with the search in another browser (i.e. not Google Chrome) then I suggest you contact Nolan Smith directly at nsmith@scouts.ca

Another useful trick for searching within a site, especially for sites with bad internal search engines, is to use Google and take advantage of the site: modifier to limit the results to that specific site.

Love your comments. Let me tell you, I'm going to share them. We have to do a much better job of sharing our strategies. If I could offer an observation - I think we as staff shy away from participating in these forums, as we have always assumed volunteers preferred a forum to share their own thoughts.
Maybe that's no longer the right attitude.
It can be kind of daunting to jump in, particularly for people not in communications, for fear of saying the wrong thing. But I think it could be particularly helpful to have others participate - particularly the program experts who've been in Scouting much longer than I.
Cheers
Susie

I would sugest making it mandatory for staff to participate on the forum to some level. it could be the only link between staff and volunteers.