Theverytiger's Blog

Going pear-shaped? Some more advice for handling crises

Honey Lucas — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:59:18 +0000

We’ve spoken on this blog before now about how to handle crises in your social media world, and what to do about negative comments (just look at any of the posts tagged ‘Pandora’s Box’, ‘negative comments’ or ‘crisis management’.). But here’s another bundle of tips, advice and examples for us all to learn from. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) none of these are from the world of the voluntary sector, but you may still find them interesting:

Another hashtag disaster, here, this time from fast-food chain, MacDonalds. In an effort to get people to tweet them with nice stories of happy farmers who supply the chain, MacDonalds rashly stopped using the very specific hashtag #MeetTheFarmers and replaced it with the dangerously ambiguous #McDStories. Unfortunately, the stories people tweeted using this hashtag were more stomach-turning than heart-warming, and generally not good for the restaurant’s PR. Read this article in The Wall Blog or this one in Mashable for more dets.

This has never happened to any of the social media pages I manage, but if any of you have a larger follower-base this question is for you: how do you cope when you are overwhelmed with comments or posts or RTs? If that’s something that your pages face, then read this article from Mashable which tells us how to manage a Facebook flood: here it is.

What disasters have you coped with? How did you manage? Care to share?

Use Twitter to Cope with a Crisis

Honey Lucas — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:21:38 +0000

Some good advice here for using your Twitter account to handle a crisis – including a useful reminder to really use those 140 characters imaginatively. There’s also the handy factoid that many journalists use Twitter as a source of, well, sources and a report that backs up that finding.

Here you go.

What’s the point of social media, number 76435.

Honey Lucas — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:05:50 +0000

What’s the meaning of life? Who shot JFK (or JR, if you prefer)? How did Sherlock Holmes escape certain death plunging off a building? These and other imponderable questions pale into insignificance against the all-time favourite: what’s the point of social media?

Well, read this article from Mashable which gives a light-hearted view of how organisations can use social media, and what pitfalls exist that we can all avoid. I particularly like the sketches… these are great at really getting the points across.

Read it all, here.

Timeline of a Twitter donation

Honey Lucas — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:56:18 +0000

Here’s a useful example of how someone gets engaged with some campaigning tweets, and is encouraged to take some action. This has come via UK Fundraising, and uses Storify to track the exchange of tweets between the charity and the potential donor.

See it yourself, here.

Fun with Facebook

Honey Lucas — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:50:59 +0000

As you know, there seems to be a never-ending tide of tips and guides to maximising the impact of your Facebook page, and so here is today’s selection, all drawn from wonderful All Facebook:

Worried about keeping your FB likers? Concerned they’re not feeling the love? Well, put away that hanky and read this article which gives 10 excellent, common-sense and highly do-able tips for keeping those relationships building.

If you are looking to replace the now defunct FB discussion tab, then find out the seven reasons for using a forum.

Lastly, if you’re planning a competition on your Facebook page, then consider these hints for choosing the appropriate prize for your audience, your aims and your budget.

That should keep you going for a day or two!

Today’s stats

Honey Lucas — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:41:41 +0000

Just a quick post, this, to bring to your attention some amazing statistics:

Firstly, Facebook’s juggernaut rolls ever onward, with estimates that the number of users will soon reach an amazing ONE BILLION. If this isn’t mind-boggling enough for you, then bear in mind that this represents one seventh of the entire population of the world. No doubt Facebook bods are creating campaigns to target those remaining six billion…

Not to be out-done, Twitter is looking forward to getting its 500 millionth account sometime next month. Whilst this figure undoubtedly includes spambots and inactive accounts, it still signifies a massive upswing in growth for the humble microblogging platform, which had a modest 300 million users less than a year ago.

And what of Google+? Well, I haven’t been able to find any very up to date figures, but some info I’ve found suggests that, back in October, there were 40 million active users.

YouTube isn’t doing too shabbily either: according to their own figures, the video-sharing site has 800 million visitors every month. Phew!

You might also be interested in this little Google mashup of internet statistics, here.

Who knew numbers could be so interesting!

More fallout from Google’s change to ‘Search+’

Honey Lucas — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:42:20 +0000

Last week Google updated its mysterious search algorithms to incorporate posts and shares that people have made via Google+. Whilst this may only be affecting the USA at the moment, it will ultimately be rolled out everywhere and we will be given the option of seeing ‘social relevant’ results in our search pages (see this post from last week for some more details).

With Google and Facebook being notoriously at daggers drawn (see this article in All Facebook), and Google also admitting that it doesn’t recognise the @ symbol as indicating it’s someone’s Twitter username (more info, here), then this does seem to mean that we are all going to have to pay more attention to G+ than we might otherwise have done… or, at least, a lot sooner.

If that’s the case, then this article from Mashable is timely: it gives you some tips about how your organisation can cope with this change to the search rankings, and how you can weight your posts to the maximum effect. Read it, here.

Another truckload of tips and tricks

Honey Lucas — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:49:50 +0000

It’s a good thing that there are all sorts of digital pioneers out there, willing to share their hard-won knowledge with the rest of us. So here’s today’s selection of tips and tricks:

What is Edgerank?
Understand more about Facebook’s fabled ratings system by reading this article in New Media Age.

Twitter tips
A whole bundle of tricks here from Mashable, telling you how to really become a jedi master of the new Twitter. Here it is.

YouTube tricks
Again, thanks to Mashable for this slideshow of stuff you can do on the world’s biggest video-sharing site. Read them and go for a lie down.

Lastly, this isn’t really social media but it may be something that will benefit your staff, volunteers, service-users etc – how to use the accessiblity features on an iPhone. Thanks, Mashable.

That’s all for now!

Negative comments – how to cope

Honey Lucas — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:43:36 +0000

If you run a Facebook page or Twitter account (or G+ account, YouTube channel or all the rest of them) then you are putting yourself out in the public domain not just to help to disseminate your organisation’s messages, but also to hear what people say in response. By the law of averages, some of those responses are going to be less than positive, from time to time.

People often ask me how to handle negative comments, and their anxiety on this point reflects the real gut-turning feeling of looking at your FB page and finding something truly unfriendly posted up there for all the world to see. So what to do?

Well, you can take a look at the Pandora’s Box thread on this blog for more ideas, or read this article from All Facebook which gives good, sensible advice about keeping on top of your monitoring and answering negative comments quickly and positively. Read the article, here. You might also be interested in this Mashable post from back in October which describes how different businesses are using social media as customer-service tools… quite a good source of food for thought.

Thank you for the thank yous

Honey Lucas — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:19:27 +0000

Howard Lake

In the first of our Guest Blogger articles for 2012, Howard Lake, founder and publisher of UK Fundraising gives us his thoughts about the importance of saying thank you to your supporters.

We all know that thanking donors is a key part of the fundraising process, from a simple business perspective but also at a human level of decency. But it is so easy to forget to do it, to make it perfunctory, and to do it poorly.

Which is why I’ve been delighted to spot several organisations not just saying thank you but doing so in a clear, genuine and striking manner.

charity: water

My favourite thank you of recent months is still that sent in video form by the founder and chief executive of US nonprofit charity: water, Scott Harrison. He sent a short personal thank you to Mackenzie, the seven year old son of a Scottish fundraiser.

I’ve heard some people call this cheesy, but I think it is wonderful. The staff and volunteers of charity: water spent a day creating a range of video thank yous to different donors and shared them via YouTube. Anyone can write a thank you letter from the Chief Exec and add her signature, but to see and hear her speak to you is a huge step forward. And imagine how many friends and contacts these videos have been shared with via Facebook, Twitter and the like.

Send a Cow

It was charity: water that I was reminded of when I first noticed what Send a Cow was doing in terms of thank yous in December 2011. They have taken the idea of thanking people to a different level but creating a whole campaign around it.

If you visit their website, Facebook page or Twitter account you will see the clear ‘thank you’ messages everywhere. They have thanked donors and volunteers in images, text and videos. Even better, they have chosen a few named individuals and thanked them very publicly (with their permission incidentally) and in light-hearted ways.

Visit their website. Their Facebook page has been redesigned to include a big thank you as part of the logo, and a string of thank you images along the top. For a while, the logo was thanking one named donor.

The Twitter icon was changed to the thank you design, and the Send a Cow team created several funny videos to thank individuals.

But there was human interaction too. On at least one lunchtime all the staff made as many phone calls to donors as they could simply to say thank you.

Although the campaign was put together with an agency’s help, many elements of it could easily be emulated by many charities at very low cost.

Amnesty International

Thank yous don’t have to be digital of course. Amnesty International UK has just sent its first mailing of 2012 which is essentially a thank you message.

“You’ve made great things happen in 2011″ it begins. “Help us do even more in 2012″.

So, it’s a thank you letter than also includes an ask for another donation. Not too unusual, but the campaigning organisation gets the tone right by including a booklet with a summary of what supporters helped it achieve in 2011. In other words, a confirmation of impact, just what many donors want to hear, especially in a cash-strapped January.

Thank you for reading my thank you musings. How will you next say thank you to your supporters?

Howard Lake is a digital fundraising entrepreneur, the founder and publisher of UK Fundraising, the online resource and community for professional charity fundraisers. He advises and trains charities and fundraising companies on using digital tools to raise more funds.