I have to admit – I never really got the hang of FriendFeed. While I want a service or an application that helps me to aggregate different forms of information streams, I don’t want to have to visit an additional site. But Buzz is integrated into Gmail which I visit a dozen times a day anyhow. And since most people I know check their Gmail or the iGoogle Dashboard regularly, this means you have real chance to create a lively discussion through Buzz.

In a way I think of Buzz as  ”Google Wave light”. Buzz doesn’t have advanced collaboration features like Wave, but it enables interaction and easy sharing of content.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Buzz is based on Wave and maybe that just shows that we shouldn’t think of Wave as a separate product but as a developers platform for applications like Buzz.

Here is what I like and what I dislike about Buzz so far:

The good:

• Conversations: I can see everybody’s replies to a message. One of the things I don’t like about Twitter is that it’s almost impossible to have a discussion with multiple people because @-replies and #-tags are so inconvenient. Granted, this is standard message board functionality. But again, a message board is a different website that you consciously have to decide to visit. Buzz is part of Gmail.
• Integration with Google Reader 1: I can see what blog posts my contacts recommend from within Gmail.
• Integration with Google Reader 2: By sharing my own blog post through Google Reader, I can push them to my Buzz followers.
• Very good photo and video-integration. Again, this reminds me of Google Wave.
• Because all Gmail users are also Buzz users, many of my contacts are instantly connected through this tool.
• Groups: You can chose to only send a message or share content with a group of users.

The bad:

• Twitter integration 1: You can see the Twitter posts of your Buzz contacts but you cannot post to Twitter. That means, that if you reply to a Twitter message your answer can only be seen on Buzz. That’s a lame and very transparent attempt of Google to keep the conversation on their own platform. However that is not in the interest of the user and very short-sighted.
• Twitter integration 2:I think that in addition to the ability to post to Twitter, Buzz should also show all of your own @replies and direct messages. Gmail could then become message-central for all you inbound messages (except for Facebook).
• Non-threaded conversations: Buzz doesn’t allow you to reply to a specific comment, i.e. there are no threaded conversations. Why?
• Privacy issues: initially, everybody can see with whom you are emailing most. See this blog post on how to fix this problem. Update (13 February): http://mashable.com/2010/02/13/google-buzz-changes/

I’m really curious to see how this will play out. I think everything is possible from massive success to dramatic failure. For me one of the main questions: Why wasn’t Google able to roll this out a year ago?

In case you want to follow me on Google Buzz – here is the link to my profile:http://www.google.com/profiles/timo.luege

What is your take on Google Buzz? Leave a comment and let me know!

Related posts:

1. Will Google Wave make students stupid?
2. Twitter blocks duplicate posts
3. Are Tweets records? Thoughts on Twitter and record keeping

Communications is only a small part of that response and social media an even smaller part. Nevertheless – here are my observations:

Convergence is already happening

As soon as the extend of the destruction became clear, American Red Cross asked the public to donate 10 USD through text messages for the Haiti response. Within the first day AmCross collected 800,000 USD. After six days they had collected 21 million USD. Since the appeal was not only spread through social media but also through mass media, it is difficult to measure how big a part social media played. But I think that the effect was significant. Because unlike when seeing the message on tv or reading it in the paper, many users didn’t have to switch device to take action.

What I mean is this: Since many people in the US use Twitter on their mobile phones, and since the donations happened through text messages, very little effort was needed on their part. They received the call to action on the same device they needed to take action.

Ease of use taps donors’ wallets

Other Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had similar text messaging programmes. But while these also raised money, none of them were as successful as AmCross’s. I’m convinced that the reason is primarily that mobile phone technology and internet use have converged more in the US than in other countries. (I’d be really interested in insights from Japan on this point)

NGOs and non-profits should take note of this development and design a mobile phone strategy as soon as possible, no matter where they are. (see also: “Time to get mobile“)  In the US it is already necessary, because donors will soon expect this level of ease of use when making a donation. And outside the US, organizations have a chance to be slightly ahead of the curve when convergence comes to their country.

Content rules

Investing in photography and videos pays off. The public and the media have an immense hunger of exclusive footage from the ground. In the first few days quality is not that important, but that quickly changes and the higher the quality to start with, the better. Because we had good content, we were able to pitch our photos to media and got noticed online.

1 million views on Flickr

Not the best photo in the world - but seen 70,000 times.

All photos in our Flickr set about the Haiti Earthquake combined generated over 1 million page views within 24 hours on January 14^th. It was highlighted by Yahoo! (which contributed the majority of impressions) but other media paid attention as well. In the first few days, BBC Online mentioned it on their live blog every time, we uploaded new images. We also got a substantial number of requests from media who wanted high-resolution versions of our Flickr photos.

Return on investment

As far as ROI is concerned I should mention that most visitors stayed within that set and did not click on other photos or through to our site. So while this was very successful to generate awareness, it did not generate substantial funds for us. However, since Flickr’s community guidelines  forbid actively asking for donations, there was no call to action under these pictures either – merely “Find out more at http://www.ifrc.org/haiti/ ”. And besides, our role as a Secretariat is primarily to highlight the work of National Societies – so for us that still is a success.

Quick and easy tools to help spread the message

We’ve also made our Flickr set available as an embeddable slide show and share the code on Facebook and with National Societies. I have no information whether this is being used a lot, but since it only took two minutes to set up I think it was worth it.

CNNireport: From online to on-air

Finally, we uploaded the photos to CNNireport, CNN‘s “citizen journalist“ portal. While this did not generate a lot of views online, CNN used a lot of these images on air.

Video: be creative

Video was – and is – much more challenging. Not only are videos more difficult to produce, there are also bandwidth issues. While photos could be sent from Haiti by mobile phone, there simply was no bandwidth to send high quality videos in the first few days. However, AmCross showed that simply having someone on camera who can talk intelligently about the situation on the ground can be enough – even if that person is far away: Tracy Reines, director of international response operations, did short video messages in the first few days in which she explained what the Red Cross was doing. Her first video was seen more than 200,000 times on YouTube. Unfortunately there was also an incredible amount of extremely racist and obnoxious comments which makes me believe that it might make sense to pre-censor comments.

3. Facebook, Digg and Reddit

We routinely post new content to our Facebook page, to Reddit and to Digg. We have never been able to generate much attention for our content on either Reddit or Digg, Facebook however was a surprise to me. It was surprising to me how little impact it had. Our stories on Haiti got pretty much the same amount of “likes”, comments and shares that most of our day to day stories get. I would have expected much more. Something I didn’t do – and maybe that was a mistake – is create an album with photos on Facebook, similar to what we did on Flickr. Maybe that would have worked better.

Crowdsourced mapping for Haiti.

4. Crowdsourced mapping

I actually want to do a separate post about this topic, because I find the crowdsourced maps that are available about Haiti extremely impressive. We haven’t been actively involved in this ourselves, but I think we have to find a way to include these resources at an operational level. For the time being, please take a look at: http://haiti.ushahidi.com/

5. What did your organization do / learn?

These are my first thoughts and experiences from a social media perspective. I’m currently on my way to Panama to assist our regional office with supporting our teams in Haiti. This will be general communications support – not social media specific – and I’m sure I’ll be too busy to blog once we have landed. But I’d love to hear from you: what your organization has done or learned about social media in emergencies. And even if I don’t have time to write, I’ll find the time to approve comments. So please share your knowledge!

P.s.: Actually I’ve been to Panama for four days now – but didn’t get around to posting this before today. It’s great to see how the Red Cross Red Crescent is doing everything to help the people in Haiti. And it’s a real privilege to be part of that team.

Related posts:

1. Slideshow for your blog: Red Cross Red Crescent photos from Haiti
2. Flickr for non-profits – 8 lessons learned
3. Haiti: behind the scenes of an earthquake relief operation

I had been hoping that “Networked Blogs” would help me to get the word out, but so far I’m a bit disappointed. While I get some traffic from the Networked Blogs-directory, I don’t find it an effective tool to promote individual posts. Currently my page has only one fan – me. Since this is a bit depressing it’d be great if you could add yourself. Thanks and I hope you’ll have a happy 2010!

Related posts:

1. Why “RSS to Facebook” is bad for you
2. “The Worldlog”: new blog catalogue for aid and development sites
3. A busy week

Related posts:

1. A busy week
2. Haiti earthquake: The Red Cross Red Crescent social media response
3. Why “RSS to Facebook” is bad for you

For those who have never heard of it, Foursquare is a web service that asks you to broadcast where you currently are – via Twitter if you want to – and leave comments about the places you visit. You can also track your friends locations and comments. In addition, you can get badges for certain activities and if you are in a registered location more often than any other member, then you become its “mayor”.

What fascinates me is that Foursquare is actually fun in a really strange way. Maybe I have played too many highscore-based games in my youth but I get a strangely perverse satisfaction out of being the mayor of a place where hardly anyone else goes to. For example, I’m currently the “mayor” of the bar across the road from work which is, if anything, just sad.

What astonishes me is that I’m obviously not the only person who feels that way and I’m amazed that this absolutely silly and completely virtual reward-system is enough to get people to compete for visiting a certain business or a certain type of business more often than anyone else. Imagine you own a restaurant of bar and think about it: here is a website that makes your customers compete with each other for who eats and drinks at your place most often. And it doesn’t cost you a dime! (Though clever business owners have started to give small real-world incentives to their “mayors”, which no doubt makes these locations even more hotly contested.)

What confuses me is how so many people (me included) are willing to share what is pretty sensitive information. We all freak out when we hear that we can be tracked by law enforcement through our cellphones or that Google’s ads on Gmail are context-sensitive to the content of our emails, but we are willing to publicly broadcast our movements in exchange for a virtual badge or a few meaningless points in a game where there isn’t even a winner. Since Foursquare ties in with Facebook and Twitter I’m pretty sure that you could quickly create a very comprehensive map of who is (regularly) where, when and with whom. It’s gotta be a burglars dream come true – you potential victims are publicly broadcasting their schedules and where they currently are. Already, users on Foursquare are demanding a tighter integrating with the GPS modules in their phones so that no one can lie about his or her location.

Which leads to what is slightly worrying me: to me it feels like that this kind of game has certain risks. It makes me uncomfortable.  Maybe the whole thing reminds me slightly too much of the fictional game “Spooks” that Charles Stross describes in his book “Halting State”. In Spooks people play the role of secret agents and are asked to pick up and deliver objects in the real world as part of the game. Later it turns out that it wasn’t really a game and that some players really were smuggling secrets around the world. With a “Spy” badge you could probably make that happen right now.

From Foursquare to fundraising

In case you are wondering whether I have a point or whether this is just a paranoid rant: I’m not sure. But I believe that if you can harness the will to compete for something meaningless like being “mayor” of the local supermarket, then there should be a way for non-profits to take that same drive to compete and turn it into something useful. To a degree people-to-people fundraisers already do that through leaderboards that show which person or team has collected the most money. But I suppose foursquare demonstrates just how much potential and power the will to compete has – at least if you are dealing with 30-somethings that grew up with arcade games and always wanted to beat the highscore. I just suggested a new badge for Foursquare: “Bleeding heart do-gooder” for everyone who visits the Red Cross museum in Geneva.

Related posts:

1. “The Worldlog”: new blog catalogue for aid and development sites
2. Why “RSS to Facebook” is bad for you
3. Cloud computing: is Google widening the digital divide?

When I created our Facebook page, I wanted to automate as many things as possible. One way to do that was to take our RSS feed and add it to Facebook’s notes function. That way, our news would be added automatically and shared with our 15,000 fans; nobody had to do anything about it and nothing would get missed.

Hindsight shows that this was a terrible idea because I did not take the needs of our users into consideration.

If the user experience sucks, nobody will come

I had noticed for a long time that the traffic we got from Facebook was minimal. But I didn’t pay much attention. If I had and thought about it a bit more, I would have noticed that the user experience sucked.

The reason: If you see a note on a Facebook page and you want to read more, you are not brought to the original source of the note but to this:

Using the notes-function, this tiny link is the only way for users to get to your site.

As you can see – this is all text. What’s more, it’s tiny text and the link to your website is even smaller. No wonder, hardly anyone bothered to click through to our site.

When I switched the RSS import off and started posting news as ordinary wall-posts the results were stunning! Immediately we got hundreds of new visitors on our web site! Doing it manually also allowed me to include a thumbnail  and write a slightly customized blurb. Sure that is slightly more work – but definitely worth it.

Adding news manually looks better and leads users to your site directly.

Sometimes problems are shockingly obvious and solutions surprisingly simply. For me this was a real “Duh”-moment.

Please, make me feel better – what was the last shockingly obvious problem you ignored for a long time?

Related posts:

1. Major changes coming to Facebook pages
2. Flickr for non-profits – 8 lessons learned
3. Haiti earthquake: The Red Cross Red Crescent social media response