I love Facebook pages: they are an excellent, cheap way to connect with your supporters. More importantly, they make it extremely easy for them to take your message and share it with their own network of friends so that you are not only preaching to the converted. However, apparently Facebook is planning a major overhaul of how Facebook pages work and many of these changes might impact non-profits. The “Nonprofit Tech 2.0″-blog has written an excellent overview of what these changes[...]
I’ve recently started to “play” Foursquare – and I’m equally fascinated, amazed, confused and slightly worried by the paradox it presents to me. 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[...]
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[...]
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[...]
I recently read a post on Janet Fouts blog about a service that offers to backup your “lifestream” (I hate that term). This is a service that offers to backup your Flickr-photos, your Google documents, your Gmail messages etc. and even your Tweets. I can see why having backups of some of these types of data can be useful – but Tweets? Who would want to pay money to have their Tweets preserved for eternity? What is “official” communication? Then[...]
Twitter recently made a change to their service that makes it impossible to repost the same Tweet within a certain amount of time; probably 24 hours. Some people say that Twitter wants to make life more difficult for spammers. However, I think their approach is so misguided and ineffective that I suspect entirely different reasons. Why post duplicate Tweets? The reason I have been posting Tweets more than once (both privately and professionally) was to accommodate followers in different time zones. Using[...]
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[...]
