When a Good Thing Comes Together: Helping Neighbors in the Gulf of Mexico

 

In June, one of my business partners from Zoetica and also a dear friend, Geoff Livingston, went on a fact finding mission as a citizen journalist to the Gulf of Mexico to see how the oil spill there had affected the community. He was deeply moved by the experience, as you can read here in his post upon his return. He went with Citizen Effect, and they documented the trip on its blog.

 

I was particularly moved by the picture of this Vietnamese girl, which was taken by Geoff at an aid station. She was there with her family to receive aid since they had lost their entire manner of survival in just a matter of days.

 

Geoff, being who he is, didn’t just want to go and report, he also wanted to do something about it. So a national day of action, which came to be known as #CitizenGulf, was launched.

 

This day of action was held last night in 20 cities across the United States on August 25, 2010, which also happens to be the fifth anniversary of the day that Katrina rolled into New Orleans.

 

Here in Houston, where I live, we held a party downtown that we called the Houston Tar Ball. We had some great local bands, including Clory Martin, Runaway Sun with Andrew Karnavas; and The Umbrella Man.

 

Over $1,000 was raised here in Houston and approximately $10,000 nationwide for the Catholic Charities of New Orleans After School Program that will provide assistance to fisher families in the form of school supplies and uniforms, as well as after school programming that includes tutoring and homework assistance, enrichment classes, recreational activities, and healthy snacks.

 

The good news is that if you missed the events last night, you can still be involved. Citizen Effect, which backed #CitizenGulf, is an organization that works with Citizen Philanthropists, like Geoff and the others that helped organize CtitizenGulf, to leverage their social networks for a common cause and promoting civic engagement.

CitizenGulf lives on. You can still DONATE HERE to the cause.

Finally, I want to thank the MANY people that made The Houston Tar Ball a success. To Grace Rodriguez for putting together the event. To Jonathan Cohen and Support Local, Grow Together, for sponsoring the event. For Jennifer Texada, my partner in crime with the Social Media Club of Houston and the Houston Social Media Breakfast.

 

Also, want to thank the music underwriters Jim Connor, Emily Connor, and AYN Brand and the many individual sponsors including Imelda Bettinger, Ed Schipul, Jennifer Evans and Tracy Besser. Finally, thanks to everyone who came (about 50 of you), donated, or otherwise spread the word about #CitizenGulf.

Welcome to the age of citizen philanthropy!

Unintentional Truth in Advertising

At a shop in Ieper, Belgium, this week. Wish all marketers were as honest.

Posted via email from kamichat's life shots and thoughts

The Six Degrees of Separation and of Actor Kevin Bacon Reimagined

 

The six degrees of separation is the idea that every person is within six degrees of knowing every other person on earth.

 

In 1929, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy published a volume of short stories titled Everything is Different. In one of the stories, the characters created a game to prove that any two people could be connected through at most five acquaintances.

 

That was (obviously) well before the Internet and the connected social web we all now know.

 

In 1990, author-editor Richard Gilliam came up with a online Movie Links game. When actor Kevin Bacon claimed in a February 1994 Premiere magazine interview that he had worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who's worked with them, a group of three students at Albright College. The three appeared on he The Jon Stewart Show and The Howard Stern Show with Bacon. Afterward they wrote a book called the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and a board game based on the concept.

 

I wondered how all of this would hold up in today’s connected web.?

 

On a lark, I searched on LinkedIn and found I was a 3rd away from Kevin Bacon’s third listing (the one with the photo) and that 22 of my connections were two away. Some, like Brian Solis, didn’t surprise me given the the company he keeps. :-)

 

Later I found out I was even closer than three -- with on of my contacts being 1st degree away from him (not sure why I didn’t show 2nd in LinkedIn, but that is another issue). He has met him at an even in NYC a few months ago.

So I did what any blogger would do. I launched a poll to find out how many of my loose connections were connected to Kevin Bacon and how closely they were connected.

 

Turns out pretty closely, out of 71 responses, 71% were related with a 3rd degree.

 

 

Click on the graphic to take the poll and see the most recent results. While you are at LinkedIn, take the poll on LinkedIn and see where you fit in (you will have to search for Kevin Bacon to get your degree of distance).

 

 

Five Steps to Strategic Social Media Management

 

Maturing in your use of social media requires a different way of thinking. Integrating social media into your communication practices is much more than getting a Facebook page, or starting to send out tweets on Twitter. You can see my full presentation on this topic below,

 

After conducting quite a few social media efforts for a wide variety of clients, I have found the following five steps to be the most critical to overall success. What would you add to these?

Five Steps to Strategic Social Media Management

1. Situation Audit: Know the Landscape 

Social media shouldn’t sit by itself. it should be integrated with the overall communications and marketing program. Evaluate what you are already doing in social media with a simple SWOT Analysis to see what you could be doing better. Also, look at

 

2. Build a Business Case: Start With the End in Mind 

PRSA has a really nice section on their website about building a business case for public relations. But it really comes down to managing expectations and spelling out opportunity costs for not engaging. And engaging goes well beyond publishing your links in social networks.

 

3. Become a Conductor: Plan It and Practice

The realities of the relentless need to create content in social media require you to make, and work a plan. It also requires you to be a sociologist, looking at what is needed in your stakeholder community that your organization is prepared to fill.

 

4. Human Resources: You Need an Orchestra of Voices 

More than ever, the person running the social media team needs to be a conductor rather than a soloist. Moreover, the whole organization needs to be a part of that mix. There are subject matter experts (SMEs) in your organization that have amazing credibility with your stakeholders. You should be adding them to the mix. You also will be building a community that extends inside and outside of the organizational walls. As such, you will need a more open leadership style and need to build in relational objectives.

 

5. Measurement and Objectives: Proving It! 

One of the hardest things that a communication professional faces is the overall expectation to prove the value of what you do. As a result, most people measure the easy stuff, Facebook friends, web traffic, and other numbers that can be very high and impressive looking. The problem becomes that this never satisfies the bosses, because they are looking to achieve business objectives like sales, legislation, donations, attendance, etc. The first measures are outputs, or interest, while the second set of objectives are outcomes or actions that are taken by your community, You have to measure both, the first is like asking for a date and the second is more like going steady, it requires committed action.

 

Measurement guru Katie Paine recommends a Kick Butt Index. Others like the Online Promoter Score. Olivier Blanchard has a pretty great set of resources on the basics of measuring ROI. And you can always read Mashable’s 100 Ways to Measure Social Media, or my own Social Media Measurement Triad and this one about measurement resources.

 

Finally, I have put together this Slideshare presentation that outlines these concepts in more detail. Would love to hear what you think is important to your social media program. What have you found to be invaluable to your approach in your organization? Always love to hear what is working.

Strategic Social Media Management March 2010

View more presentations from Kami Huyse.

I Don’t Have Time to Google You: Micro Fame Breeds Arrogance

I saw this tweet today. And while it was penned by someone who, in general, has been pretty approachable, all I could think was, “How arrogant.”

I purposefully did not add this person’s name to the tweet because this isn’t really about calling someone out, but more about the dangers of fame, both real fame (celebrities), or microfame (social media type).

I get that when you have a modicum of Internet fame that people are always hassling you to do things for them. But then again, they are the reason you have that modicum of fame.

I believe that the relatively recent focus on personal branding is making this worse. I have written about my view of the personal brand, and how I feel that building character and connections are so much more essential than building a brand for yourself. Moreover, my business partner Geoff Livingston outlined the dangers for companies that hire people who are “personal brands.”

When Fame Breeds Arrogance

I think that nothing quite illustrates this level of arrogance as well as the recent publicity stunt orchestrated by LeBron James. I was actually heartened to see the uproar over his self aggrandizing move. There was no humility at all in that drama.

I couldn’t help but notice that he tried to soften it a bit by holding it at the Boys and Girls Club and donating advertising revenues from the stunt to the charity. I can see why B&G chose to take the offer, but I honestly think his self-centered play is not one that I would want my children to emulate.

Or my peers for that matter.

But we seem to be slowly embracing a culture of rude behavior and self centered action. And I used to be bothered when someone set their voicemail to say, “I will return your call at my earliest convenience.”

I always hated that.

Here are few more for my book of social media pet peeves…

Google Me!

Photo by Dustin Diaz

I have also noticed a few other, less monumental things. When I first attended SxSW Interactive in 2008, someone handed me a business card with their name and the words “Google Me” on the card. I have seen quite a few more since. It was a major turnoff. To the person you hand such a card it says, “I think I am more important than you” and worse “My time is more important than yours.”

Why couldn’t they just give me the information? Heck, if you are having trouble thinking up clever ways to present your business card, Mashable recently wrote, 12 Clever Social Media-Friendly Business Cards, start there.

iPhone Map Me?

Photo by Marco Papale

With today’s announcement that the iPhone 4 will not be recommended by Consumer Reports until it fixes its faulty antennae, I was reminded again of how much I hate that phone. One of the things you can use the iPhone to do is set your Twitter location to the latitude and longitude of where you are at that moment. But please don’t. I want to know where you are most of the time. If you want to do location based updates, use Gowalla, Foursquare, Whirrl, or a number of others.

When I groused about this on Twitter earlier today, Scott Oliver was so kind as to let me know how to translate profiles with Latitude/Longitude locations into real locations. The trick is to paste them into a Google Map and hit search. Which I could have easily found out with a well phrased Google search, but doesn’t that take me back to the last point about making me Google you!?!

So these are my current social media etiquette pet peeves. What are yours? And yes, you can start with telling me that ranting blog posts like this one are your pet peeve, no worries, I can take it!

Though I had no intention of calling him out, Peter Shankman takes umbrage with this post, here is what he has to say.

Google Update: How to Find Old Conversations from Twitter

Someone pinged me today asking about how to find an old hashtag conversation on Twitter. Awhile back I would have had to say they were out of luck. But thanks to a deal with Google that was penned earlier this year, older tweets can be found. I found it wasn’t really all that intuitive to use the new Updates Search feature but it does provide hope for the data miner and procrastinator alike.

 

According to Google, they have Tweets back to February 11, 2010, and this simple search for my Twitter name shows that this is about right. Here is a quick “How to” for finding an old conversation.

 

How to Use Google Update Search

1. Go to Google Search
2. Search for your unique term or hastag, let’s us the #PRStudChat as an example
3. Once you get the results, go to the MORE dropdown arrow on the left and chose UPDATES (see screenshot below)
4. After you hit UPDATE, a chart for the current day’s tweets will show. Notice the hyperlinks for the Year and Month . Clicking on any one of these will take you to that view.
5. You can go back and forth through the timeline using the Guillemets <<>>

 

How to Find the Google Update Search Feature (#3)

 

Navigating the Google Updates Search Feature (#4. #5)

 

 

If you are looking for a way to get a complete picture of what was said about a particular topic over a period of a few days, it will be a labor intensive endeavor. And traversing through the timeline is not seamless – it is easy to find yourself lost.

 

And let that be a lesson to you. If you are running a campaign with hashtags, be sure to get your search data in on the spot, or at lease with in seven days. I like What the Hashtag. It is  is a great tool to look at recent conversations.

 

You can usually look up hashtag-led conversation that are up to seven days old there. And I recommend if you are running such a campaign or conversation on Twitter that you add the hashtag to the What the Hashtag database and click on the “View Transcript” (see blow) to get a handy transcript of the session in chronological order. I usually save this screen as a PDF and fire add it to the documentation for any given campaign.

 

Good stuff!

 

However, even this service can fall victim to Twitter’s endless API shutdowns and sometimes misses some stuff and it is only available for seven days – again Twitter API limitations. Don’t use it for a contest, for that I would use Real Time Contest. It is currently in closed Beta, but you can hit up Chris Kieff for when he plans to go public.

 

Happy Birthday America

I made this ice cream cake with my son today to celebrate the pretty bold move by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence. NPR had a pretty great reading of the declaration. Take the just under 9 minutes to listen to it and ask yourself how people would react if something similar was put out there today. Pretty radical stuff.

http://m.npr.org/story/106168024

Happy 4th of July!

Posted via email from kamichat's life shots and thoughts