Based on our experiences in Samoa and Haiti, I’m trying to come up with best practice for how to organize tweeting staff in a disaster context so that there is a maximum benefit for the organization. These are my thoughts:
Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category
To say that the last days were“intense” would be an understatement. From the minute the earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement pulled out all stops to help the people on the ground.
Communications is only a small part of that response and social media an even smaller part. Nevertheless – here are my observations:
I have been using Flickr for about two years to increase visibility of the work of Red Cross Red Crescent. Today, I’d like to share some of the lessons I’ve learned.
Given how obsessed everyone was with how social media helped elect Barack Obama, I’m surprised that I haven’t read more reviews of this book: “Yes We Did – An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand” by Rahaf Harfoush, which gives an excellent overview over how the Obama campaign used social media to mobilize people to donate time and money.
Harfoush (@rahafharfoush) was a volunteer with Obama’s new media team. She describes the different tools that the campaign used along[...]
One of my projects over the last few months was to write and get approval for social media staff guidelines for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). I’m sharing them because I hope that they will be useful to other organizations who are working on similar documents.
One of the most persistent and hardest to dispel myths in social media is that of the “quick win”. Since Facebook, Twitter etc. are easy to use from a technical point of view and since there are always stories of people getting an insane amount of attention through these channels, many people assume that there is no work involved.
Scott Stratten has recently posted an excellent, short video (1:52 min) explaining why you can’t expect to open a social media account today[...]
Every time I’ve witnessed the restructuring of an organization or company, the same thing happened: within minutes of the announcement, the foot soldiers gathered in the cafeteria, voiced their surprise over some of the changes and discussed why certain things simply won’t work. I’m normally one of those people.
Organizational structures are information architecture
The other day I realized that the challenges that management face when deciding an organizational structure are not very different from the problems that web managers have when creating or[...]
October 15 is Blog Action Day – an annual event where a bunch of activists are trying to focus the attention of the entire world on one topic.
Their method: Get as many bloggers as possible to write about this topic. No matter what the normal topic of the blog is, no matter whether it is a long or a very short post. Basically they are trying to flood the web with their chosen issue for a day, which would then also[...]
