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.
I’ve used the New Year’s break to do some minor housekeeping on the blog. Among other things, I updated to Wordpress 2.9 which has some really interesting new features. I also (finally) created a Facebook page for the blog so that you can see updates in your news feed – if that is something you want.
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[...]
Just before I left for my mini break to Prague last week (great city!) I saw “Us Now“, a one hour feature about how collaborative tools can help us make better decisions.
The film is public domain and if you want, you can watch the complete documentary below. You can also buy it on DVD, watch it on YouTube or download it as a torrent! In fact, the film project’s website is almost as interesting as the film itself, which is[...]
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[...]
