For most executives, the advocacy, marketing, and fundraising potential of new social media technologies is both exciting and daunting. For nonprofit executives in particular, the opportunity to reach new audiences and donors at substantially lower cost while raising their organization's profile through powerful new viral marketing techniques is simply too good to ignore. At the same time, many nonprofit leaders are unsure how to identify people with the skills needed to create effective social media campaigns or how to delegate new, often-unfamiliar tasks and responsibilities to already overworked staff members.

Although the number of Web 2.0 titles has mushroomed over the last few years, Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0 to Recruit, Organize, and Engage Youth stands out — not least because author Ben Rigby, the founder of Mobile Voter, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to using Internet technology to empower young people's participation in civic life and politics, readily acknowledges that the field is too new to have solidified around a single right approach or answer to the social media puzzle. Instead, Rigby provides examples of what has worked and what hasn't, and offers suggestions for how you can familiarize yourself and your staff with powerful social media technologies already in use.

Each chapter of Mobilizing Generation 2.0focuses on a different technology — blogs, social networking, video and photo sharing sites, mobile phones, wikis, maps, virtual worlds — and is framed the same way. Readers learn how each technology works through examples of successful and not-so successful campaigns, and then are told what to consider if they want to create a campaign based on those technologies.

A not-so successful campaign, such as presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's early experiment with online video, teaches us that we can all learn from our mistakes. For those unfamiliar with the campaign, Senator Clinton's team began posting "Hillcasts" — a series of half-hour videos filmed in a very presidential environment in which she answered questions submitted by supporters — on her Web site. But because the videos were not posted on a video-sharing site like YouTube, Clinton's young supporters were unable to post comments or respond to the videos with videos of their own. The result was a lot of negative feedback, and the Hillcasts were dropped after only three weeks. Clinton then launched a new campaign on YouTube asking users of the site to help her select an official campaign song, responding to their submissions each week in video format. "She laughed at the absurd, poked fun at the angry, praised the kind, and encouraged additional submissions," Rigby writes — and the campaign proved to be surprisingly effective, attracting over 200,000 votes, three thousand comments, and a million page views. Even the mainstream media took notice.

Mapping and virtual worlds, two recent technologies that have achieved substantial popularity, also pose obstacles for organizations interested in initiating social media campaigns. In 2007, for example, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger launched a mapping campaign designed to help kids from low-income households find healthy meals in their neighborhoods. Although the map served an additional purpose by informing city officials about gaps in access to healthy foods, the fact that low-income families are less likely to own personal computers meant that its use was limited in terms of the target population.

Or consider the example of Global Kids, which in the summer of 2006 organized an intensive three-week "leadership camp" on Teen Second Life, a version of the popular Second Life site, to engage youth on a variety of global issues. During the course of the camp, participants identified child sex trafficking as the most crucial issue facing youth worldwide. So, as their final project, participants constructed a virtual maze designed to educate other young people about the issue and to raise money for the Polaris Project, which works to combat human trafficking and modern-day slavery. More than twenty-five hundred teens visited the maze in the first ten weeks it was online, and twenty percent of those visitors made a donation to the Polaris Project. But although the event was considered a success, Rigby points out that "virtual construction requires learning a new and complex toolset and committing to ongoing management. The investment is considerably higher than an equivalent effort on a social networking site."

Examples such as these are scattered throughout the book and help to keep things moving along. In addition, each chapter leads into a short essay by a well-known champion of social media, including Beth Kanter, trainer, social-media coach, and author of Beth's Blog; Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube; Seth Godin, author of nine books about marketing and the founder of Squidoo, a fast-growing recommendation Web site; and Katrin Verclas, executive director of NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network.

Rigby closes the book by listing the four factors common to all successful social media campaigns: (1) learn how new technologies work and how people are using them; (2) dedicate adequate resources to the exploration and deployment of these new technologies; (3) consider a campaign's target audience and whether the technologies being considered are relevant; and (4) adopt a personal and transparent approach to your online campaigns, while letting go of control and handing it over to your supporters.

It doesn't matter whether your understanding of Web 2.0 technologies is beginner-level or advanced; Mobilizing Generation 2.0is full of great information about how to recruit, organize, and engage not just Millennials but Gen-Xers and baby boomers who are curious about these new technologies or have already incorporated them into their daily work routines. As Rigby writes in closing:

"Every few generations, the ties that bind our society are shaken loose, and we're able to reshape the facets of our lives. We can repair past inequalities, redefine citizenship, and reframe the terms of economic success. We're in the midst of such a moment now. As social change makers and politicians, we have the opportunity to guide these forces toward the greater good."

What are you waiting for? Get out there and mobilize!