This is the behind-the-scene interview with Simon Mainwaring, the author of ‘WE FIRST,’ at the Social Good Summit. At the Summit, Simon talks about ‘Building a Private Sector Pillar for Social Change.’ Got a few more Q&As with Simon, which I’ll put it up soon.
Category: Social Media
How this First Lady Uses Social Media
It’s fascinating to learn what other politicians or the spouse of a politician uses social media for. We know for a fact that President Obama enjoys a social media celebrity status, because he’s one of the few politicians who have millions of followers! What about on the other side of the world?
There is the First Lady of Dominican Republic, Dr. Margarita Cedeno de Fernandez, a celebrity politician in her own right.
When she made a surprise appearance at Social Good Summit, she talks a bit of how she uses social media. She says that “she is both a follower and user of social networks, Twitter, Facebook.” These tools give her the ability to be connected with the youth and people from around the world.
In her capacity as a First Lady, she uses ICT (short for information communication technology) to empower women, improve literacy rate, economic development. If you want to connect with her, the twitter handle is @margaritacdf.
Check it out.
A Preview to Social Good Summit 2011
Next week, we will be at the Social Good Summit, a four-day summit hosted by the good guys at Mashable, UN Foundation and 92Y. This is a second year of a four-day event where technologists, influential minds, government officials, and activists will hob nob and come together to find the solutions for the world’s most pressing problems. Problems like education, health, malaria, etc. That and in addition, there will be 8 startups (that are changing the world!) competing for a $10,000 prize in a ‘Startup Challenge.’
The lineup of speakers include Ted Turner, Lance Amstrong, Muhammad Yunus, Pete Cashmore (in case you’ve been hiding in a cave, he’s the founder of Mashable – the most visited side for all things social media), actor Geena Davis, Ami Dar (if you’re looking for non-profit jobs, his site ‘Idealist’ is the go-to source), Scott Harrison (the Charity:Water guy), and many many more. You just have to see it yourself, here.
When is the Best Time To do Your Social Media, Email and Blogging?
Sometime last week Dan Zarella, the social media scientist with Hubspot, gave a webminar on the science of timing. He’s looking at the best practices of when is the best time to do your social, email and blogging by analyzing data from hundreds of thousands and millions of bits of data. (note: all the graph presented in his data are EST standard).
Best practices for Social Media, Email and Blogging
> The best time to gain retweets is in late afternoon and week.
The contrarian side, based on data of click-through rates of links among the highest users of Twitter, weekends are also considered as one the best time to get retweets. In fact, weekends are better than Mondays or Tuesdays.
Other findings:
– Links to Facebook pages that posted every other day, gain more likes.
– If you tweet to gain more followers & reputation, tweet a lot more. For example, Guy Kawasaki tweets on average 23 a day! And he has some 331k followers. However, if you tweet links to your ‘own’ content, you want to do it randomly. Give space if you want to tweet it again.
> Weekends are best for Facebook sharing
Since about 54% of companies blocked access to Facebook, articles published early in the morning tend to do better than those published later in the day. Take note of this, unlike Twitter – where frequencies don’t matter much – Facebook is more frequency sensitive.
Dig deeper into 5 Questions and Answers of Facebook marketing
> Send emails very early in the morning.. like 6AM.
Send them in the morning. Emails are getting more attention either early in the morning or on weekends. If you’re sending “good” emails, open rates higher on weekends because your email are getting more attention from your readers. And new subscribers are your best friends. This is when you can experiment with timing. The best time to talk with your new subscribers are few days after they signed up. Don’t be afraid of unsubcribes, because they actually can help you to have a clean list.
This data is very interesting: unsubscribes are actually highest if you only send once a month email. Good email, that is. That means, you can send more emails to your list.
The key here is sending good, relevant information.
> Blog published between 10-11AM tend to get the most views.
More people read blogs in the morning and during the week. You also want to know your audience and understand them. If you have more men that read your blog, they tend to read blogs in the evening. So you can experiment by posting later in the day. On the contrary, to get comments, weekend is your best bet.
> To get the juice out of links, published your blog post early in the morning…like 7AM.
This is the time when most bloggers are looking for ideas on what to write. Blog posts that are published very early in the morning tend to get the more read and links.
Bottom line: experiment with your own social media, email, and blogging and measure it to get the most out of your marketing dollars.
Happy Birthday, #Twitter
Happy 5th birthday, Twitter!
What’s happening?
Bloomberg Game Changers did a segment on the three Twitter founders – Jack Dorsey (the earlier inventor), Biz Stone, and Evan Williams this month. It’s pretty fascinating story and has some true-tried lessons for entrepreneurs. Yeah, they’re big company now, but “the flight is not always smooth.” If you need a pick-me-up, check out the video.
There are 4 big lessons for wannabe entrepreneurs (that you can learn from them):
#1. Never never give up.
Great entrepreneurs never give up. Evan Williams never gives up in his dream, even when the company he co-founded with Meg Hourihan ran out of money. The company was struggling. He had: NOTHING. And he was the last employee on Blogger, but he carried on. Until Google came calling.
#2. Believe (and keep your dreams alive).
The three founders didn’t started Twitter not because “they knew where it’s gonna go.” But because they believe that this is a good thing. They’re driven by that belief. Update: Brian Solis (in his Facebook) writes a comment “..we cannot undervalue Jack Dorsey’s original idea.” Yes, indeed, he is the original/ earlier inventor. And how he keeps his dream alive until he met the other two founders, with whom together they founded Twitter.
#3. Be nice. Even if you’re a competitor.
Evan Williams and Biz Stone worked at competing businesses. Blogger vs. Xanga. Who knew that one day, they’d be working together as founders of the company?
#4. Failure is part of success.
If you never fail, you never learn. That’s just come with it. It’s part of the process. So expect detour.
Eventually, when you keep plugging away (and focus on ) in light of failures and challenges, through life’s twist-and-turn “opportunity will find you.” Detour means, that it’s not your time.. yet. You’ll need to practice a little bit more. Because “practice makes perfect.”
Kick-off Ecotwist Radio
RESCHEDULE TO NEXT TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 23: So my guest didn’t call in. That prompted me to reschedule the show.
UPDATE: He just called in (tied up in a meeting) and we agree to do it on Tuesday the 23rd. (There’s some learned lessons to improve the show for next time).
President Obama announced that tomorrow, November 19, 2010, is as National’s Entrepreneurs’ Day in conjunction with Global Entrepreneurship Week. Each November, GEW connects people everywhere in the world through activities to help them unleashed their idea by exploring their potential as self-starters and innovators.
Connects the dots. I’ve been kicking around with the idea of hosting an educational radio show on business and sustainability for a while. So today is the day. The kick-off of my show, Ecotwist.
My first guest is Andy Shallal, an Iraqi American, who is an activist, artist and restauranter. Andy is a successful entrepreneur. His flagship restaurant, Busboys and Poets, has been a success from the opening. He is someone who is recipient of multiple awards on sustainability, activism and business. I met Andy a while back in the summer through a networking group, Net Impact. NI hosted their event at his restaurant. So after the event, I approached Andy to be on my show, then still in the thinking process.
Busboys and Poets is a local DC restaurant chain. The restaurant chain is an example of good business practice of the triple bottom line – people, planet and profit. It’s a certified B Corporation. They have a number of sustainability initiatives in place, i.e. uses renewable energy via wind energy, recycle their oil for biofuel, uses 100% recycled products, copy paper, carry-out items, serves sustainable seafood. And believes that ‘transparency is an important component of their environmental agenda.’
If you happen to be around, you can listen via your browser at http://blogtalkradio.com/ecotwist. You can also join the conversation at 323-693-3030.
Steal this Presentation! Seriously.
Doing a lot of presentation? Make it a CRAP.
C= CONTRAST
Text and images are all the same size and style is extremely boring and not communicative. Add some contrast to make it interesting.
R= REPETITION
Repeat colors, fonts and images throughout your presentation for a cohesive feel (remember color mix?). Each new topic slide should have related styles so that your audience knows you are moving into a new point.
A= ALIGNMENT
Text and alignment on each side should be visually connected. Nothing should be out of place.
P= Proximity
Related elements should be grouped together.
And finally..
The Social Business and Customer Service
Businesses got to love change. Not just change, but sustained change. That’s the message from Frank Eliason. If that hasn’t sunk in your business culture yet, listen to this interview on social business and customer service. Brian Solis interviewed Frank, who Brian says is “one of the fathers of modern customer service.” At Comcast he started using Twitter to interact and communicate directly with their customers. He was the guy behind @ComcastCares. Speaking about career development, Frank Eliason is now the Senior VP of Social Media at Citibank.
The money quote:
“One day, customer service will be marketing.”
Reuse Data for Valuable Content
The other day, I posted my frustration dealing with sharing report, because the report is tight-locked under copyright use. I stumbled into Andy Sernovitz’s blog (the word-of-mouth guru) this morning and there he posted something about Chevron’s use of social media data.
Who knew that Chevron have been monitoring the social media sphere for awhile? What they did with the data that they’ve been collecting over a period of time, is reused it by creating valuable content that gets distributed across social media platforms. And the best thing is: they make it easy to share. It is “not buried under mountain of restrictions and legalese,” which is very un-corporate.
Furthermore, Chevron posted the report on a different site that was (I think) for community outreach, with catchy name Will-You-Join-Us.
Some key takeaways, via Andy’s Answers:
- Look for external uses of your internal projects. Raines and his team realized their monitoring data on energy issues was valuable to more than just their company — so they turned their work into a report that thousands of key industry influencers have since downloaded.
- Get people talking by making it easy to share. Chevron didn’t bury its report under mountains of restrictions and legalese — it simply encouraged people to post the report and to attribute the material to Chevron when doing so.
- Use all the tools that can help your content spread. Chevron’s “Pulse Report” is a 60-page white paper — but they didn’t just post it on their corporate website. They also posted YouTube videos summarizing it, shared it on Facebook and LinkedIn, and made it available for download on Slideshare and Scribd.
Watch video of the presentation.
Chevron Pulse Report: The State of Online Conversation About Energy Issues, presented by Robert Raines from GasPedal on Vimeo.
Why the United Nations Needs to Go Creative Commons
With the rise of social publishing, the United Nations need to lead by going Creative Commons license for all of their publications. You know that the UN has published thousands of world class publication for everyone. These publications are available for free for anyone with online access. Yup, free access.
However, they’re missing the boat by locking most of their publications into Copyright situation. Case in point, this publication on “Kick the Habit,” a comprehensive guide to climate neutrality for everyone – yes, everyone from individuals to organizations to cities, governments, SMEs (small-medium enterprises) and corporations – pretty much cover all of us who uses energy. However, this guide is not easily accessible for anyone unless it gets to the hands of influencers, who can then help spread out the message around via different medium like Twitter, Facebook, social publishing, etc. you name it.
I almost got kicked out from Scribd (a social publishing) this morning, because I wanted to share (read: non-profit, non-commercial) this Kick-the-Habit publication (pdf) online so people can access it, read it and get educated on the issue of going carbon neutral.
Here is the email I received from Scribd this morning.
Hello, DewitaSoeharjono —
We have removed your document “Kick the Habit” (id: 40082915) because our text matching system determined that it was very similar to a work that has been marked as copyrighted and not permitted on Scribd. Like all automated matching systems, our system is not perfect and occasionally makes mistakes. If you believe that your document is not infringing, please contact us at copyright@scribd.com and we will investigate the matter.As stated in our terms of use, repeated incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your Scribd.com account and prohibit you from uploading material to Scribd.com in the future. To prevent us from having to take these steps, please delete from scribd.com any material you have uploaded to which you do not own the necessary rights and refrain from uploading any material you are not entitled to upload. For more information about Scribd.com’s copyright policy, please read the Terms of Use located at http://www.scribd.com/terms.
Best regards, Scribd Support Team Questions? http://scribd.com/faqThis is the UN COPYRIGHT.
So the way I understand it, it IS okay if you made copies for non-profit distributions. But it’s NOT okay for online distributions. Interesting…
Digital vs. hard copy influence
Want more people to read? A quick math on Scribd: 60 million readers every month, 20 million embeds, millions of people readcast (read and let people know what they’re reading). Plus it can get downloaded by IPad, Kindle, and some other e-reader gadgets. It’s about distribution. That stats versus printing 200-some pages! Why waste papers these days if you don’t need to? Hellooooo? There’s more upside potential, i.e. more people read, online. That’s the fact.
Creative Commons is about democratizing publishing and access. Look, I am not using it for commercial purposes. My intention is to share worthwhile reading materials with others. You think after this I’m going to upload UN stuff. No way, baby. It’s not worth the risk. Because I still want to share the world with more reading stuff going forward.
By the way, the UN is not alone in this case. There are other organizations have the same attitude on copyright thing. I know I singled out them (sorry about that) because they have many more organizations under their wings. If they lead, others will follow.
I just hope some UN officials in New York, or elsewhere in the world, pay attention to the implications of online culture on sharing. Sharing is social. Social means less restrictions.
Nuff said. Let’s unlock the potential…
Tink3rs 