Google Analytics

I got the first inkling that something might be wrong when I looked at my Google Analytics stats noticed that I had received traffic for some keywords that were definitely not content on my site: porn and warez in other words. I couldn’t make head or tail of this since I had just  double checked the comments module to make sure that no spam had managed to slip through.

When I searched for some of these keywords my site did indeed come up a couple of times, but since the keywords weren’t on the pages when I checked, I filed it as a problem to be investigated later.

I can see something that you can’t

That changed when a former colleague of mine contacted me and said he could see some weird stuff on my site. He then shared his screen with my through Skype and I was able to verify that the code he got when visiting my site was different from the code I got when looking at my blog.

Now I got really alarmed. After all, I’m using my blog to share my expertise and to acquire customers. If they looked at my blog and saw porn and warez it was unlikely they’d hire me.

Fixing the problem

Big thanks go to Frederic Vuong who supplied a lot of useful links and tips to help me. However, in the end it was slightly more complicated then I was prepared to deal with. So I contacted a WordPress agency that I had worked with in the past. However, their quote of 400 USD and approx three days of work didn’t exactly make my heart sing.

In the end I found “Sucuri Security” through the WordPress forums. For 90 USD they took care of the problem in a matter of hours and I now have a one year subscription with them so that I could go back to them if there was a new infection. In addition, they have supplied me with a WordPress Plugin that helps to increase WordPress security.

Lessons learned

According to Sucuri, one of the vulnerabilities I have had on my site was a theme that I wasn’t even using. It’s a theme I had downloaded two years ago and which I kept in my theme folder but never used and of course never updated. I had no idea that this was a security risk. I have now:

- removed all themes and plugins that I’m not actually using

- installed the lockdown plugin which limits the number of false login attempts

- installed the Sucuri plugin

I’ll also include the lockdown plugin and the Sucuri service to the list of things I’ll recommend to non-profits who are building their own WordPress based websites.

No related posts.

Photo: Greenpeace UK (CC BY-NC-SA)

Most organizations are rather protective of their official voices on social media channels.For good reasons: they don’t want to risk being misunderstood, being kicked out of countries because of ill-phrased retweets or creating policy by accident. The downside of this is, that the official Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of many NGOs and UN agencies are rather dry and boring and had all life sucked out of them.

Turning Twitter into an “all-staff” channel

For the next six weeks, Greenpeace UK will try a different approach: anyone in the organization who has a personal Twitter account and has signed up for the experiment, can push their tweets to the main Twitter account by adding the hashtag #gp to their tweets. As their “slightly nervous” web team says: “What could possibly go wrong?”

 Diversity of individuals

While this approach would make me a little nervous as well, I like it more and more, the more I think about it. Rather then being the voice of the institution, the Twitter channel becomes a mirror of what the staff members have on their minds. The result will almost certainly be more interesting and engaging than the usual dry press releases. I can see how this could lead to a very interesting dialogue between Greenpeace staff members and their supports over all kinds of topics.

A question of training and trust

Granted, for Greenpeace it’s slightly easier to do that than for the ICRC, MSF, UNHCR or other organizations who work in highly politicized conflict regions where a critical tweet about a government could mean the end of an aid-programme. But in my experience most people are very responsible and only very few are stupid enough to endanger their own jobs by ill-considered messages on public accounts.

It all comes down to training and guidance: have you explained to your staff what social media is and what kind of messages are and aren’t acceptable? Then you should be able to trust them. And if you can’t trust them, then you haven’t trained them properly.

What do you think? Would you open your Twitter account to all staff members? Leave a comment below.

Related posts:

1. Non-profits and social media: how to leave the competition behind
2. Social Media as a Tool for Humanitarian Protection
3. Photographer sues AFP for 120 million over Twitter-photos

Data highlights changes in behaviour

Equally interesting is what he would like to do in the future: for example get information showing the streams of money being sent via mobile banking in developing countries.  If the UN could see changes in behaviour, he argues, then  they might be able to spot issues that are in the process of developing.

If, for example, people in a certain region stop saving money to their mobile bank accounts and if at the same time there is a significant increase in money being sent from the capital to that region (presumably by relatives), then this could indicate that there is cash-flow in that region problem which might warrant additional investigation.

It’s an interesting idea, though clearly fraught with all kinds of legal and technical difficulties.

Related posts:

1. Online training: Tech Tools for Emergency Management
2. How Invisible Children turned Kony 2012 into a viral success

(Photo by GreenLight Designs)

A photographer is suing AFP and Getty Images for 120 million US Dollars over photos that he had taken in Haiti after the earthquake and which he had shared on Twitter.

I find it remarkable that this story doesn’t get more attention because it shows just how much trouble you can get into if you take photos from social media platforms without making sure that you have the necessary rights.

Downloaded from Twitpic

In a nutshell here is what happened (check out the British Journal of Photography if you want more details):

Daniel Morel is a professional photographer and was in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake happened. He immediately started taking photos and made some of them available in high resolution through Twitter/Twitpic. The photos were retweeted and an AFP editor downloaded them and shared them with AFPs own subscribers as well with Getty Images who resold the photos as well. In total 820 copies of Morel’s photos were sold.

The question, which is now being discussed before a New York court, is whether what AFP did was legal or not. AFP argues that Twitters Terms of Service grant third parties the right to rebroadcast content.  In addition they argue that Morel de facto consented to the photos being reused in a commercial fashion by making them available through a social network in high resolution.

Morel naturally sees things differently and sues AFP/Getty for the maximum amount of 150,000 US Dollars per alleged copyright infringement.

The rules apply to everyone

This is a really interesting case because AFP essentially argues that it was ok to take the photos and even profit from them financially, simply because they were on the internet. However, at the same time AFP and Getty are pursuing bloggers who take their photos without permission. Surely you can’t have it both ways.

Besides, I would argue that companies, whose sole business model is acquiring and reselling rights should really know better and be held to a higher standard.

I doubt and I don’t think that Morel should get 120 million from AFP. But whatever amount he gets in the end, it should be a warning to all NGOs and humanitarian organizations who are lax about acquiring rights for photos and videos. Having written  permission to  use photos is absolutely essential!

Related posts:

1. Sharing photos online – a decision matrix for non-profit organizations

The panelist for the 90 minutes discussion were:  Jason Cone (Director of Communications, MSF USA), Melissa Fleming (Head of Communications, UNHCR) Claudia Gonzalez (Head of Marketing,The Global Fund) and Daniel Stauffacher (ICT4Peace).

If you have the time, watch the discussion – links are at the bottom of the page. For me, the main points were:

• An HPCR survey showed that a substantial number of aid workers are also active social media users.

For me that shows once more that humanitarian organizations urgently need to assist their staff in using social media responsibly. While NGOs should want their staff to talk about their work, the organizations also have to make sure that their staff knows what is appropriate and what isn’t.

• Traditional media has less and fewer resources to cover foreign news but there is an audience for in-depth foreign news reporting. Humanitarian organizations are increasingly becoming full service news providers, similar to stringers and have to deliver complete packages of text, audio and video to mainstream media. This also means that communicators in the field are expected to deliver to professional standards equal to CNN or the BBC.
• It is much more difficult to emphasize with the fate of a large group of people, than that of an individual. Social media gives NGOs the opportunity to focus on individual stories.
• Humanitarian organizations continue to fail to communicate with beneficiaries. Social media can be a channel through which beneficiaries can talk back.

While this is certainly a possible channel, I personally think that social media cannot be the answer to this issue. We have been talking about this for years and I don’t think that this is a technical problem, it is a cultural problem. Organizations are (for many reasons) simply not focusing on talking to beneficiaries.

• Social media can help humanitarian organizations to get a better picture of the situation on the ground via crowdsourcing and can help the affected people to organize itself.
• Social media is just one tool in a very big toolkit and is frequently not the most appropriate tool (I cannot repeat this often enough).

A recording of the discussion can be downloaded on iTunes  or watched as recorded livestream.

Related posts:

1. Non-profits and social media: how to leave the competition behind
2. Would you let your logisticians manage your Twitter account?
3. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap

• Compfight – Search engine and plug-in for Creative Commons photos 

Flickr hosts over 6 billion images, many of them being licensed under Creative Commons Licenses. Compfight is a search engine that helps you find those images. However, the main attraction of Compfight is not the website itself, but the WordPress plug-in.

Once installed, you can search for CC licensed images directly from within a new post you are writing and Compfight will insert the selected image including the license and photo credit. The only thing I don’t like about the plug-in is that it hotlinks the image, rather than uploading it to the media library.

(h/t Manage WP) 

• 6 Tools to Build a Mobile App on the Cheap

While some people might clearly have a different definition of “cheap” than the author, these services can still help you develop an app for your non-profit for less money, than when hiring a dedicated programmer. Considering that “mobile” is becoming more and more important, these services might be helpful, particularly if your organization is working with volunteers who need to capture date or wants to share location based information. 

• In the Eyes of Others: How People in Crises Perceive Humanitarian Aid

Great study, but why does it have to be 206 pages long?

“Over the past 40 years, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has developed a reputation as an emergency medical humanitarian organization willing to go almost anywhere to deliver care to people in need. Yet when questioned about MSF, people in countries where it works had different perceptions. One thought MSF was from Saudi Arabia and financed by Muslim charities. Another thought it was a China-based corporation. And yet another believed MSF requires everyone who enters their medical facilities to be armed (quite the opposite, in fact).”

• Infoasaid: Diagnostic Tools

“infoasaid has developed a set of diagnostic tools aimed to support: community and audience profiling, information needs and access assessments, communication strategy development and feasibility assessments related to different channels of communication.”

• Beyond Kony 2012 (e-book) 

Amanda Traub from Wronging Rights has published an e-book for those who want to know more about Kony and the LRA, follwong the Kony 2012 campaign.

“This book is both a collection of that criticism [of the campaign], and a constructive response to it. The authors each wrote a short essay offering information that they felt was missing from the video, or explaining how they thought the campaign could be improved.”

The book is sold at a suggested retail price of 2.99 USD, but you can also download it for free. I have already bought it since I have been following her blog for many years, but  have unfortunately not gotten around to reading the book yet.

• The worst way to judge a charity

The LA times is talking about why administrative costs are a bad way to judge the effectiveness of an aid organization. While the points that are raised are hardly new for anyone working in this industry, it is nice to read this in a mainstream newspaper.

Related posts:

1. Posts worth reading: from social media ROI to digital storytelling
2. Posts worth reading – 1 April 2012
3. Lack of communication fuels panic during riot