Digital Citizens “Social media for social good”

Things I wrote down from the Digital Citizens “Social media for social good” event in Sydney, 13 April, 2009.

Disclaimer – these are my rough notes, and there was wine.

“The average blog is read by six people,” “the future will be angry with us for demonetization,” and foursquare has some secondary uses which could be interesting i.e. urban planning and health scares– Kim McKay [@redshoes on twitter] (who heard these at South by Southwest this year).

Alan Jones [@bigyahu] (who mediated) made the point that “people are the media” which is in line with what I’ve been reading by Jim Macnamara [@jimmacnamara] who says we are living “in the media” in his book “The 21st Century Media (R)evolution.”

Karalee Evans [@Karalee_] from Headspace had some interesting things to say about:
• reaching the youth demographic who don’t read papers or watch TV. She talked about the need for a strategy around social media, and also about the importance of getting the whole organization on board from Board and CEO level to clinicians etc.
• They only have 300 followers on twitter, and are more interested in the quality engagement in this forum than numbers
• Facebook acts as a solid referral page to their website, which acts as their main call to action.
• “Social media is a long term investment”



Mark Chenery [@Mark_Chenery] from Action Aid’s Project Toto was brave in talking about the initial failures they had with social media, and then the eventual successes.
• Basically they rushed in, chose the wrong spokesperson, didn’t really understand the medium well enough or how to reach the people who would want to be reached by them, and lacked overall strategy. Bugger.
• But then they found the right people, and things are on the up.
• His quote of the night (for me) was “Social media is not about quick results. Take out the media and what have you got? Social. And what’s social? Relationships. And now we have really deep relationships.”

Nic Mackay [@nicmackay] from The Human Race did a decent job of justifying working with the big corps in a room full of people inclined to chomp at the bit to criticize such behaviour (except the agencies of course, who licked their lips). Things I liked from him were:
• A great side of social media, and twitter in particular, is as a powerful source of information which allows you to build relationships with people you otherwise never would have had access to
• He wonders whether social media encourages good behaviour by businesses though since it is overwhelmingly focused on the negative. People are quick to criticize, far slower to praise.
• He also said that while social media does give people the opportunity to engage with brands/orgs (and vice versa), people often don’t follow up their comments or return to the source to find out what happens. An interesting point, but I think that this accurately reflects how people have always engaged, piecemeal, and sporadically, with fragmented attention, we just never knew before because communication was so one-way.

David Ahood [@davidahood] who works on the Nestle campaign at Greenpeace spoke too. Most interesting from him was
• The surprise at the success of their campaign which went viral and exceeded all their expectations. It reinforced to me how unpredictable social media is, which in turn makes setting KPIs (cringe) hard. This has implications for resourcing, especially for smaller orgs.
• He also reinforced that social media can’t just be an add on, but has to be part of the campaign, completely integrated, and has to be genuine.

Questions/issues I am left mulling over from the great night are:
• How scalable is social media really? It’s all well and good now to say we should all be doing it, but the reality is that it is still an emerging medium with small numbers of participation. Is it really possible to engage meaningfully with individuals when you are a Nestle, or a Nike, or even a Greenpeace. What happens when you set the expectation that genuine, meaningful engagement will occur in these forums, but you can’t actually resource such engagement? This sparks reputation management concerns for me in the long term.

• I’m also interested that Digital Citizens didn’t find out who was in the audience more thoroughly. They didn’t know who I am or why I was there, and I would have thought this would have been useful info. And sure, they now have my twitter username and e mail, but I brought a guest, and they have no idea who that person was or why she was there. Interesting.

• David Ahood made a joke about climate change (implying we’re all sick of it) that got a lot of laughs, and when you have someone from Greenpeace making that joke, climate change is in even more dire trouble than I thought. Admittedly, this could have referred to an in-joke I’m not aware of, but even so, for the people not in on the joke, it came across as a bit alarming really.

Overall it was an awesome night, and I’d definitely sign up for another one. A big thanks to the organisers.