Social Media 4 Good » Web 2.0

5 posts worth reading: data journalism, crisis mapping, Twitter and a creative YouTube campaign

Timo — Mon, 21 May 2012 05:45:27 +0000

Like many consultants, I spend a lot of time reading articles and blog posts from around the web. Here are some posts I found particularly interesting. This time they are about data journalism, crisis mapping, Twitter and a creative YouTube video.

The Data Journalism Handbook

A lot of communication around aid and development is about making sense of data and communicating data-based analysis to the media and donors. The free “Data Journalism Handbook” gives some excellent tips and ideas how to understand and deliver data to a wider audience.

Crowdsourced crisis mapping: how it works and why it matters

Take a look at this article, if you are looking for a good overview about what crisis mapping is and why it has potential. It might come in handy if you need to convince a pointy haired boss that it’s something worth exploring.

45 hashtags for social change

One of the most common questions I get asked by organizations starting on Twitter is: “How do I know which hashtags to use”? This list of 45 hashtags that are commonly used in the non-profit sector are a good place to start. Socialbrite even includes a PDF so that you can print it and hang it next to your desk.

Tweets in Translation

Anybody who runs multilingual social media channels knows that translating tweets and staying within the character limit is a real challenge. Here is a graph that shows by how much the character counts normally change when translating tweets from English into 12 other languages.

“Live with it!” iPhone app

Last but not least, something to make you laugh: a small, Dutch NGO has created an awesome video in which they spoof Shell’s environmental record. There is an app for that …

Would you let your logisticians manage your Twitter account?

Timo — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:15:26 +0000

Photo: Greenpeace UK (CC BY-NC-SA)

Most organizations are rather protective of their official voices on social media channels.For good reasons: they don’t want to risk being misunderstood, being kicked out of countries because of ill-phrased retweets or creating policy by accident. The downside of this is, that the official Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of many NGOs and UN agencies are rather dry and boring and had all life sucked out of them.

Turning Twitter into an “all-staff” channel

For the next six weeks, Greenpeace UK will try a different approach: anyone in the organization who has a personal Twitter account and has signed up for the experiment, can push their tweets to the main Twitter account by adding the hashtag #gp to their tweets. As their “slightly nervous” web team says: “What could possibly go wrong?”

Diversity of individuals

While this approach would make me a little nervous as well, I like it more and more, the more I think about it. Rather then being the voice of the institution, the Twitter channel becomes a mirror of what the staff members have on their minds. The result will almost certainly be more interesting and engaging than the usual dry press releases. I can see how this could lead to a very interesting dialogue between Greenpeace staff members and their supports over all kinds of topics.

A question of training and trust

Granted, for Greenpeace it’s slightly easier to do that than for the ICRC, MSF, UNHCR or other organizations who work in highly politicized conflict regions where a critical tweet about a government could mean the end of an aid-programme. But in my experience most people are very responsible and only very few are stupid enough to endanger their own jobs by ill-considered messages on public accounts.

It all comes down to training and guidance: have you explained to your staff what social media is and what kind of messages are and aren’t acceptable? Then you should be able to trust them. And if you can’t trust them, then you haven’t trained them properly.

What do you think? Would you open your Twitter account to all staff members? Leave a comment below.

How the UN want to use Big Data to spot crises

Timo — Tue, 15 May 2012 07:18:04 +0000

In the presentation I embedded below, Robert Kirkpatrick from the UN’s Global Pulse team is talking about how United Nations agencies would like to use big data to search for crises in real-time. It’s a fascinating talk and Kirkpatrick shows how his team has been using data mining techniques to monitor bread prices in Latin America and rice prices in Indonesia.

Data highlights changes in behaviour

Equally interesting is what he would like to do in the future: for example get information showing the streams of money being sent via mobile banking in developing countries. If the UN could see changes in behaviour, he argues, then they might be able to spot issues that are in the process of developing.

If, for example, people in a certain region stop saving money to their mobile bank accounts and if at the same time there is a significant increase in money being sent from the capital to that region (presumably by relatives), then this could indicate that there is cash-flow in that region problem which might warrant additional investigation.

It’s an interesting idea, though clearly fraught with all kinds of legal and technical difficulties.

Social Media as a Tool for Humanitarian Protection

Timo — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:26:07 +0000

Back from my vacation I had the opportunity to listen to a live webcast on “Social Media as a Tool for Humanitarian Protection” that was organized by the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR).

The panelist for the 90 minutes discussion were: Jason Cone (Director of Communications, MSF USA), Melissa Fleming (Head of Communications, UNHCR) Claudia Gonzalez (Head of Marketing,The Global Fund) and Daniel Stauffacher (ICT4Peace).

If you have the time, watch the discussion – links are at the bottom of the page. For me, the main points were:

An HPCR survey showed that a substantial number of aid workers are also active social media users.

For me that shows once more that humanitarian organizations urgently need to assist their staff in using social media responsibly. While NGOs should want their staff to talk about their work, the organizations also have to make sure that their staff knows what is appropriate and what isn’t.

Traditional media has less and fewer resources to cover foreign news but there is an audience for in-depth foreign news reporting. Humanitarian organizations are increasingly becoming full service news providers, similar to stringers and have to deliver complete packages of text, audio and video to mainstream media. This also means that communicators in the field are expected to deliver to professional standards equal to CNN or the BBC.
It is much more difficult to emphasize with the fate of a large group of people, than that of an individual. Social media gives NGOs the opportunity to focus on individual stories.
Humanitarian organizations continue to fail to communicate with beneficiaries. Social media can be a channel through which beneficiaries can talk back.

While this is certainly a possible channel, I personally think that social media cannot be the answer to this issue. We have been talking about this for years and I don’t think that this is a technical problem, it is a cultural problem. Organizations are (for many reasons) simply not focusing on talking to beneficiaries.

Social media can help humanitarian organizations to get a better picture of the situation on the ground via crowdsourcing and can help the affected people to organize itself.
Social media is just one tool in a very big toolkit and is frequently not the most appropriate tool (I cannot repeat this often enough).

A recording of the discussion can be downloaded on iTunes or watched as recorded livestream.

Behind the scenes of the American Red Cross Digital Operations Centre

Timo — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:45:43 +0000

I’m currently travelling and don’t have a lot of time to blog. But I just came across a blog post that I wanted to share with you: Patrick Meier visited the American Red Cross headquarters in Washington D.C. and got a tour of the brand new Digital Operations Center which AmCross is using to monitor social media during emergencies.

The set-up is quite impressive and I think shows what you have to invest, if you are serious about making social media monitoring an integral part of your emergency response operations – unless you rely mainly only the distributed power of volunteers in the crowd. I really hope that AmCross will also make this amazing resource available to other Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

And while I can’t see OCHA ever having the resources to build something similar for UN agencies, I would hope that they at least schedule a visit and take a look.

Behind the Scenes: The Digital Operations Center of the American Red Cross

Internet manhunt shows that sub-contracting is most efficient strategy

Timo — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:12:40 +0000

A while ago, I wrote about the global Internet manhunt that the US government was organizing. The “game” took place on March 31 and the strategy of the best-performing team showed, that sub-contracting was the most efficient way to track down the wanted people. Instead of trying to find the targets themselves, they created incentives for others to do the work and even hire additional workers.

And while the game as such still makes me uncomfortable, I find their approach to solving the problem quite interesting.

Kim Stephens from idisaster 2.0 wrote a great blog post about how the winning team did it:

The Social Media Tag Challenge: Crowdscanner describes how they won

My new project: “How to choose a content management system – the non-profit guide”