Volunteer at UROC in North Minneapolis. They need your help.

Not sure if you've been following it, but there's a big effort going on among U of M staffers to help out North Minneapolis in the wake of the tornado. Much of the word has been driven by social media. Find out more on the Brief Facebook page. Here are a few of the most recent updates, viewable in the notes section of Facebook:

May 27 update, 10 a.m.:
Over 100 volunteers again at UROC this a.m.

--City-led long-term recovery committee met at UROC this morning: 45-50 city/county officials and community leaders in attendance (including UROC exec director Heidi Lasley Barajas)

--Outreach team now on the ground on the North Side; Senior VP Jones and Dr. Barajas part of the group.

--One outreach shift tomorrow, May 28 (Saturday)--9 a.m.-1 p.m. Volunteers needed. No van from campus.

--UROC will continue to be involved in tornado recovery efforts next week in a variety of ways. No on-the-ground outreach is planned out of UROC, but UROC staff will refer volunteers wherever they might be needed on the North Side.

May 26, noon update: Reports are coming in that volunteers are running out of food to meet community needs on the north side. Teams are coming across homes and apartment buildings where cupboards are empty and refrigerators full of spoiled food.

Nonperishable food can be dropped off at the UROC building, 2001 Plymouth.

The 2011 Communicators Forum conference is THIS Thursday--don't miss it!

Still haven't registered? Register right now (Yes, right now!) for the conference. Our fantastic keynote this year is John Moe, host of Marketplace Tech Report and the Wits series at the Fitzgerald Theater. We also have an array of fabulous sessions, including Wing Young Huie's session on the University Avenue Project, a session with the Geek Girls, a Burlesque-related session, and much more! The day ends with our much anticipated Maroon and Gold Awards and a reception at the Campus Club.

Hope you all join us at Coffman Union on Thursday, May 12!

Tweet late, email early, and don't forget about Saturday: Using data to develop a social media strategy

At this point in the social media game, there's a lot of pontification being pitched about and not whole lot of the Dragnet ethic. It's hard to say what's what about social media at this point, but this analysis gives a few great pointers. Try them out and see for yourself. A few I'm going to try to ride with:

• Tweet a lot to accumulate as many followers as possible, but if your goal is to drive more traffic to your site, you should show a little more restraint; accounts that share two or more links an hour show a dramatically lower clickthrough rate than those who share no more than one.

• Reach people when the noise of the crowd has died down. It turns out that time is often the afternoons, when blogs and news sites are slower, and the weekend, when they're all but asleep.

• Retweet activity is highest late in the work day, between 2 and 5 p.m., and the sweet spot (tweet spot?) is 4 p.m. Late in the week is most retweetable, too.

Use TweetWhen to analyze your Twitter account to see what time days and times yield the most retweets.

Read the full story at Nieman Journalism Lab.