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[...]
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[...]
The United Nations Joint Inspection Body recently spoke to web professional in 40 UN agencies to identify what the most common problems are and how to fixed them. The result is an impressive document that can be used by many non-profit organizations, NGOs, International Organizations and even government ministries and agencies to address similar problems in their own organization. The ”Review of Management of Internet Websites in the United Nations System Organizations“ (31 pages) focuses on website governance and strategy – and I still[...]
Update (4 November 2009): the Social media guidelines have been approved. Two month ago I wrote that I had started to create social media staff guidelines for my organization. Here is a short update: Since my last post, I spoke to all relevant stakeholders in the organization. In my case these were the Communications Department, Human Resources, the Staff Association, the Security Unit, IT, the Legal Unit. I also met with both the Undersecretary General and the Director who oversee these[...]
Four major disasters in less than 72 hours – what a week! For us, it is the first time that we are employing social media consistently and as a major tool to tell people about what is happening in an ongoing disaster relief operation. I’ll update you soon and will try to share statistics about what worked and what didn’t.
Seth Godin recently wrote a post titled “The problem with non” in which he claims that non-profit organizations fail at social media adoption and that the reason for that is fear of change. Here are six reasons why I disagree: 1. There is a difference Oprah and an NGO „Take a look at the top 100 twitter users in terms of followers. (…)None of them are non-profits. (…) Is the work you’re doing not important enough to follow, or is it[...]
I’ve just been reading Ken Burbary’s blog and came across an excellent story from Scott Monty. I think it’s a beauty in itself and doesn’t need any additional commentary: “A friend sent me a PDF of an article from a business journal in which a company expressed reservations about this new technology over which everyone seemed to be abuzz. They decided that they would restrict employees’ use of it, because of the fear of corporate secrets getting out, of insider[...]
