Today is International Women’s Day. IWD was created by some crazy Socialist party members in the early 1900s who thought women should be protected, celebrated, and not locked in factories where they die in horrific fires. IWD is a holiday akin to Mother’s Day in some countries where they receive gifts and I can only assume a trip to their local version of the Olive Garden. Here, they get doodles on Yahoo! and blogs by Madonna.

I wanted to mention the Yahoo! doodle, because I’m more of a Google man, but Yahoo! spread their animated Rosie the Riveter themed doodle far and wide, while only Googlers in Russia were treated to a flowery logo. Yahoo! also has a special Women’s Day 2010 page showcasing great women past and present. Of course, they also have a big content staff.

Google's Women's Day doodle was only seen in Russia where it is a National Holiday.

Speaking of content. Huffington Post bloggers jumped in with featured posts on the Huffpo homepage from Madonna and Amb. Karen Kornbluh (No, not the great 80s singer, but the US’ permanent rep. to the OECD).  Nick Kristof could not be left out of course. He had a typically smart and clear post offering up Three Proven Steps to Advance the World’s Women. Kritof mentions that this year is the 100th Anniversary. That seems to be in dispute. I’ve seen 1909, 1910, and 1911 listed as the first IWD. I’ll stick with 2011. Hopefully, next year the digital world will generate more noise to celebrate the Centenary. Perhaps, we need more women on Twitter? More likely, we need more women who have a chance for a quality education. Onward.

Should your non-profit be on Linked-in, Flickr, and Facebook at the same time?  With so many social networks it’s often difficult to determine which combination makes sense for your organization.  In cases like these, a little cheating is completely fine.  This Social Media Cheat Sheet goes over the pros and cons of using some of the major social networks.  Download the pdf here.

The Green Market has assembled a great list of some of the funniest and innovative videos produced for the environment movement.

One of my favorites is a Steven Colbert piece where he makes fun of climate change deniers who claim that Washington’s recent snowfalls repudiate global warming.

See the whole list here

One of the issues you face as a citizen journalist using your mobile to blog and report on events happening especially in conflict zones is the fear of reprisal. As they say on MobileActive.org :

Mobile phones are used to compose stories, capture multi-media evidence and disseminate content to local and international audiences. This can be accomplished extremely quickly, making mobile media tools attractive to citizens and journalists covering rapidly unfolding events such as protests or political or other crises. The rise of mobiles has also helped extend citizen journalism into transient, poor or otherwise disconnected communities.

However, for those working under repressive regimes, citizen journalism can be a double-edged sword. Anything you create and disseminate can be used against you, whether through the legal system or in other more sinister forms of suppression.

The video of the death of Neda became an iconic image representing the protests in Iran (Image from IndyMedia.ie)

To address this MobileActive have produced an excellent How-to guide on best practice on mobile citizen journalism. It includes a good primer on what the threats you could face are and ways of browsing and uploading content securely.

This might be basic for people who do this for a living and NGO workers will be aware of some of these issues already. But it’s an important contribution to free reporting in dangerous situations as most “citizen journalists” are ordinary people who by definition don’t have the protection of major organisations behind them.

Read the full Guide to Mobile Security for Citizen Journalists and if you know people living or working in countries with oppressive regimes try to let them know this info is out there.

The ubiquitous calls to help Haiti by texting “Haiti” to 90999 last month, and the $41 million raised by the effort, may have opened your organization’s eyes to the possibilities of mobile messaging, but what are reasonable expectations for more run-of-the-mill mobile campaigns? To answer this question, M+R and MobileActive.org have released 2010 Nonprofit Text Messaging Benchmarks.

Building Your List

Percentages of subscribers who make a call (to a congressman, for example) or sign a petition via their mobile phones when asked to do so via text message

The report found that nonprofit text messaging lists grew at an annual rate of 49.5%, with the overwhelming majority of subscribers (80%) joining the lists by entering their mobile numbers on a Web page.

Most organizations leveraged their existing e-mail lists to grow their text messaging lists, which explains why most text subscribers are also e-mail subscribers (73% – 87%). “Hence,” says the report, “for the organizations in this study, text message is primarily being used to communicate with email supporters through an additional channel, not as a way to communicate with a different set of supporters.” This may be an important consideration when deciding whether to invest in building your text messaging lists — especially since the churn rate for text lists was much higher than that for e-mail lists: 30.7% vs. 19%, according to the report.

Messaging Your List

Fundraising may come first to mind for a text campaign these days, but the report found nonprofits and advocacy organizations are conducting five distinct types of messaging:

• Fundraising – The $10 per donation limit is far less than the e-mail average, notes the report, but text fundraising messages increase the success rate of e-mail solicitations when subscribers receive both.
• Advocacy – 4.7% of subscribers make a call (to their congressman, for example) when asked to do so via text message; 14.6% of subscribers sign a petition in reply to text messages asking them to do so.
• Informational – News alerts or reminders to vote, for example.
• Go-to-Web – Sending subscribers to a Web page to take a survey, take an action, or just check it out.
• Text Reply – Asking subscribers for their thoughts/ideas, for example.

The free report has more specifics, of course, as well as links to case studies of many of the campaign types. I definitely recommend downloading it.

More Benchmarking Studies

See our previous posts on benchmarks for e-mail advocacy and fundraising and social networking.

Smashing Magazine is one of my favorite blogs for design news and opinions.  It’s where you go if you are a font geek or want to see what’s happening in the online design world.  They recently posted a really cool article reviewing some non-profit web sites from a design and usability point of view.  Even a few sites like the Red Nose Day Campaign or the WWF, which have some of the best designs around got taken to task for a few design errors.

Checkout the article here.

AddtoAny reports twice as many shares to Facebook over E-mail

This is some interesting info that popped across my Google Reader. The abundance and ease of use of “share tools” mean that social networks are rivaling email as content sharing platforms. Interestingly, lags.

5 Billion

pieces of content were shared on Facebook per week during February, according to data released by the company.  This is up big from 2 billion per week only five months ago in September 2009.

A study released by content-sharing widget AddToAny indicates Facebook is sharing twice as much content as email currently. However, a separate study by rival ShareThis showed Facebook still a little behind email, with about 30% less content being shared. Taken together, Facebook is just as powerful a content-sharing platform as email. (Twitter is well behind both, but rising.)

Source: Facebook

via Silicon Alley Insider.

The Pew Research Center have released the fourth version of their ” The Future of the Internet” series, which is pulled together from surveys and questions  to  leading digital thinkers and  figures around the world.

This version of the report tackles questions like

• Will Google make us stupid? Report says no
• Will reading, writing and knowledge gathering be improved by the internet?  Yes, but there are concerns
• Will innovation continue to catch us by surprise?   Boo! Yes, of course it will
• Will information flow freely? Hope it will, but there will be flashpoints over control of the internet
• Will anonymous online activity still exist?  Divided answers, with many agreeing it will be sharply curtailed.

Is a hot topic for many digitally minded folk when they get together over networking drinks and one that won’t be answered in a single blog post from me.

It seems that no matter how big or small an organisation is, successfully integrating a social media strategy throughout a entire organisation, is a difficult and frustrating task for digital teams, who battle old-school “silo” thinking from senior managers when they are trying to get new projects off the ground.

Steve Bridger

UK social media consultant, Steve Bridger, (@stevebridger) has put some thinking into the problem and produced a great slide show – “Putting People at the Heart of Social Media Strategy” specificly aimed at senior communication managers, who are still struggling to understand the social media environment.
My suggestion is to email this around your workplace (as we all know the people who look at this slide show don’t use twitter, or your internal knowledge management tools) and start a conversation to tease out what is stopping your organisation from having a truly integrated approach to social media.

And, don’t let the conversation stop,  tell us who you think is on the money on social media strategy at the moment.

The bipartisan health care summit is in its final hour and I suggest using one of the pages listed below to catch a glimpse if you haven’t already. Obama is certainly in his element leading a frank and policy-heavy discussion on the thorny issue. My British friends used to joke about how bad Bush would have looked if he ever had to take part in something like Prime Minister’s Questions. Well, today I’m trying to imagine him sitting in Obama’s chair and pulling something like this off so smoothly. My favorite moment was more procedural as Obama adjourned the meeting so House members could take part in a vote, “The bus is waiting outside to take you over, guys.” It was as if he was running the small group breakout session at some conference. Community organizer, indeed. For those not lucky enough to be in this “small group,” the web offered several channels to participate…well, watch and moan at least.

Visitors to YouTube today found an over-layed link on every page promoting the site’s live broadcast of Obama’s health care summit.

The link led to a live video on YouTube’s Citizen Tube channel. Viewers can watch the summit live and participate by asking questions thanks to a Google Moderator embed included on the page. Moderator is a simple tool that gives viewers the chance to submit questions and vote on which questions they would like answered. Moderator is free to use and anyone can create a “Series” and allow questions. Moderators can choose if questions must be from logged in users (using a google account), or anonymous participation will be allowed.

Google Moderator in action on YouTube's Citzen Tube page

The use of Moderator is part of Google/YouTube’s continued efforts to release tools they’ve used to power contests, debates, and live chats (though we still wait for live video). Moderator came last year along with the release of YouTube Direct, which gives website owners the ability to have videos uploaded to YouTube through their own site. YT Direct means that a nonprofit could host a video contest on their own site, and generally use YouTube as a back end to host their videos while keeping users on their own site. It’s a smart move by Google since it is in their interest to collect as much data about users as possible — something that is far more valuable to the search and ad giant than having users ON their sites. Tools like Moderator and YT Direct help bring new tools to nonprofits and other web operators, but also give Google more data to work with.

Beyond YouTube, the White House’s own excellent team is making the video available on their White House Live, which includes a page on WhiteHouse.gov pulling in Twitter updates with the #hcr tag.

Twitter feed on the White House's Live coverage health care summit

Viewers on the White House site can click through to Facebook (as seen in screenshot above) to take part in the discussion on that platform via the White House Live Facebook App.

We can’t forget the actual live video websites who wouldn’t be left out of the Obama video fun. Ustream.TV hosts a White House channel, which they featured on the front page. Ustream runs a clever system called, “Social Stream,” which lets users login via Twitter, Facebook, aim, or even MySpace (MySpace? I guess for Tom?).

LiveStream.com also featured the summit, but through The Uptake’s channel. LiveStream supplements their built in chat with options for Facebook or Twitter linked chat. However, it doesn’t integrate as cleanly as Social Stream since each chat client runs in a separate tab.

LiveStream's chat uses tabs to login with different clients

The good news is, you can chuck your TV and still get all the political blow by blows and tons of other content thanks to the growth of live streaming video. The better news is each system is continually growing and integrating smarter chat and questioning features that let you or users speak up. The bad news? As evidenced by the health care summit where none of the questions from viewers were actually asked on the floor, our ability to talk will always come up against those in power’s desire to listen. At least they are running out of excuses thanks to new technology.