Social Media 4 Good » Twitter

HOW TO: organize your tweeting staff in a natural disaster

Timo — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:32:53 +0000

Based on our experiences in Samoa and Haiti, I’m trying to come up with best practice for how to organize tweeting staff in a disaster context so that there is a maximum benefit for the organization. These are my thoughts:

The organizational approach

After the Tsunami in Samoa we gave one of the IFRC communicators on the ground access to the @Federation Twitter account through Hootsuite. She preceded every post with “From Samoa:” and then wrote about what she saw.

Advantage: 1. People might already be aware of your organization and might have followed you even before the disaster happened. Even if not: if someone associates your organization with a specific disaster, then he will find you quickly through the Twitter search. 2. The organization benefits directly from any growth in followers. 3. You can use that growth to create awareness for other issues that aren’t in the spotlight.

Disadvantage: 1. Not very personal, even if the person signs off with initials. 2. Completely unrelated stuff might be part of the Twitter feed, i.e. a tweet about Haiti can be followed by something about Mongolia.

What's in a name? Photo: TaranRampersad

The personal approach

After the Earthquake in Haiti a number of our communicators went to Port-au-Prince and used personal Twitter accounts to talk about their experiences. We used @Federation to promote these accounts and re-tweeted most of their tweets.

Advantage: 1. Personally, I’d rather follow a person than an organization. Social media is all about personal interactions and being genuine; a personal account is simply better suited for that. 2. On topic: If someone is in the middle of a disaster then all his tweets will be related to that experience.

Disadvantage: 1. People have to find and follow these accounts, whereas they might already be aware of your organization’s Twitter account (see above). In other words, extra work is needed to promote these accounts, something you’ll have to do every time your staff rotates. 2. The organization does not benefit directly from the growth in followers. 3. Seen from the perspective of the account holder: As soon as your employer promotes your Twitter account, you have to watch what you are saying. Anything you write might be taken as the position of the organization. All of a sudden you have to ask yourself: Can you still share that slightly dirty joke or that funny photo? What about a link to a politically controversial site? 4. Followers might stay with the account, even when the account holder leaves the organization.

The CNN approach

A large number of CNN reporters use “CNN” as part of the Twitter name. Examples: RosemaryCNN or WolfBlitzerCNN.

Advantages: 1. While this method retains a “personal” touch, this is clearly a work account and there is a clear identification with the employer. 2. Followers “belong” to the employer.

Disadvantages: Anybody can add a few letters to their name. This might give imposters more credibility as long as Twitter doesn’t have a good complaints mechanism in place.

I’m also wondering why CNN is not using this method consistently. AndersonCooper or Soledad_Brien for example do not use CNN in their names.

The List approach

Lists could be part of the solution. Photo: koalazymonkey

I’m increasingly starting to ask myself whether this could be what lists are for:

You could create a Twitter-list, e.g. “Red Cross workers in Haiti”, with everyone who is there and then promote that list. Then, as staff rotates in and out, you add and remove names from the list. You promote the list – not the accounts – in all communications.

Advantages: 1. It is personal because it will carry the voices of the people in the field. 2. Since lists are curated, the content is mostly topical. 3. You can add and remove names without having to promote new account names.

Disadvantages: 1. Twitter’s own web interface does not feed the content of lists into you regular Twitter stream. That means that this approach assumes that your followers are using advanced Twitter clients that display list content in addition to your regular Twitter stream. 2. Since the list will be new, you will still have to promote that list. This is less work than promoting individual accounts, but it’s still an extra step. 3.The organization does not benefit directly from the new followers since people follow the list, not your organization’s account. 4. What happens with the list after the disaster?

My conclusion

I’m tempted to vote for a combination of lists and the CNN approach. I.e.:

Get your staff to use “corporate” Twitter accounts for their work related activities
Add accounts to lists when appropriate, no matter whether they are using corporate or personal accounts
Retweet selected tweets from the list
Promote the list in all communications

What do you think? What is the best approach?

Google Buzz: Friendfeed replacement or Wave light?

Timo — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:10:59 +0000

I hadn’t been following the news recently, so I was genuinely surprised when I saw “Google Buzz” in my Gmail dashboard today. My first impression is: this could work for me. But not as a replacement of Twitter. I rather see it as something to replace FriendFeed.

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!

Haiti earthquake: The Red Cross Red Crescent social media response

Timo — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 02:50:02 +0000

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:

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.

The Foursquare-Paradox

Timo — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:54:55 +0000

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 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.

Are Tweets records? Thoughts on Twitter and record keeping

Timo — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:10:41 +0000

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 I suddenly realized that doing this might actually be really important: the rules of my organization state that we have to record and store all official communication for a certain number of years. Once a year all our press releases, appeals documents etc. get printed and burned on a CD before being sent to the archives.

A legal obligation to preserve Tweets?

Do you need to archive your Tweets? (Photo: ed ludwick)

But what about Tweets, Facebook updates and similar forms of communication? Considering they are written by someone from the communications department – does that make them official records as well? If they are, then we should have a mechanism to preserve and archive them as well. I’m sure this will become an issue – and probably sooner rather than later. However, I expect that the first time that this will become a legal issue will not be in a non-profit context but with a big cooperation where a Tweet has influenced the stock price.

But if your legal status as a non-profit (the rules differ from country to country) requires you to have copies of all your official communication, or if your internal policies say you have to do it, then it might indeed be a good idea to start backing them up.

Recommended reading:

Charles Stross wrote a long but excellent post about the possibilities and dangers of recoding every aspect of our lives.

Twitter blocks duplicate posts

Timo — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:01:05 +0000

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?

Duplicates can be beautiful (Photo: OctoberCrystal)

The reason I have been posting Tweets more than once (both privately and professionally) was to accommodate followers in different time zones. Using the excellent mmmeeja-mashup on Yahoo pipes I have been able to see that on my private Twitter account I have a lot of followers in Europe and a lot in the Eastern United States. The geographical spread is even bigger for my work-account.

In order to reach them, I reposted each important Tweet (i.e. not every Tweet) once, normally eight to 12 hours after the original message. To do this I was using Hootsuite which has a very easy to use ”pending tweets” functionality.

The (lack of ) effect of the changes

I can’t do this any more since Twitter will not allow me to post exactly the same message within a few hours. Of course, all I have to do to prevent the Tweet from being blocked is change a few characters: I might remove one hashtag, add quotation marks to the title or do a similar minimal change and voilà - the Tweet goes through.

Am I the only one who thinks that spammers will find a way to make these changes automatically? After all: they can get around the restriction, simply by adding three random characters to the end of each Tweet – or by adding @ to the beginning.

So from a spam-prevention perspective I think that this is one of the least efficient measures that I have ever seen. And I’m sure the guys at Twitter are aware of it. Why not do it differently and limit the amount of Tweets that can be sent per hour to, say 120?

Just an excuse?

I think the real reason for this change might not have been to fight spam at all but to deal with the capacity problems that Twitter is experiencing. Considering how often I’ve seen the fail-whale over the last weeks, I can see how Twitter might have been desperate to find a quick and dirty solution to reduce the volume of Tweets. Blocking duplicate Tweets could have been the easiest way to cut 5 to 10 per cent from the volume.

Duplicate posts on Twitter – acceptable or a real pain? Please leave a comment and tell me what you think!