4 Ways to Use Social Media for Your Organization

Picture by fredcavazza

Coming back from staff conference, I am appreciative of my colleagues in embracing social media. In particular, Twitter was used effectively in sharing thoughts, getting information out and answering questions stemming from main sessions and breakout working groups.

To help those new to social media we put on a social media scavenger hunt. It was simple and consisted of tasks to be finished by day and an honour system submission form saying you finished to put your name for prizes at the end of the conference. The tasks focused on using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube.

What was the end goal? It was to help those in non-profit organizations to use social media effectively in engaging people with their message. For us, it was to help people discover Jesus. Here are some suggestions on using social media for your organization.

1. Engage with your constituents on Facebook by creating a Facebook Page for your organization. In this space, post in such away to garner responses. Check out these 6 helpful suggestions. My favourite ones are make a caption for a photo and fill in the blanks. Another great idea is to ask how you or your team can pray for your followers.
2. Use Twitter to listen in on what people are saying. Michael Hyatt's helpful social media framework lists one way to use social media as an outpost. Search keywords that help you understand what your target audience is thinking.  
3. Share photos of events on Instagram to raise awareness of what your organization is doing.  Pictures link your purpose and vision to reality. Have a central staff manage your Instagram account and have the rest send him/her pictures to post. Use creative captions and common hashtags to help spread your cause. 
4. Create quality videos to post to Youtube and share on Facebook and Twitter. Pictures are worth a thousand words, how much more are they on video? Whether it is an update on events or a documentary related to your cause, video is powerful and can be reshared using other tools. Youtube's recommended viewing tools will also help to spread the video around within Youtube. 

How are you using social media for your organization? What are some best practices that have worked for your organization? 

How to Be a Good Customer on Twitter

Back in 2010, I wrote how Twitter has added value to my life and one of the points was how customer service can be more effective by companies using social media as outposts.

Photo by Djof

But outposts only work if customers are using social media to seek help or give feedback. Here is how you can be a customer that can influence companies to be better at customer service by using Twitter. I will use my recent interaction with @NissanCanada as an example.

Include Company's Official Twitter Handle
Companies who use Twitter to listen in on conversations will have live feeds of keywords related to their business, but there is nothing like mentioning them in an actual post. For my car service, I searched for Nissan Canada's official handle (account) and mentioned them directly. Some people use hashtags, but the problem with hashtags is that they are user generated and not consistent. Companies may not pick up your creative hashtags. #toocreativetobenoticed

Tweet Specifically the Problem
There is nothing like a customer who vents and no one knows why they are venting. By including the reason, I was able to give the company a way to address the situation. I got a reply back a little over an hour after I posted. Although that may seem long, I was still waiting for service at Nissan so it mattered to me that they responded.

Share the Love
After a couple of direct messages back and forth they asked for the dealership location. At this point my car was ready and I did not think anything about it. However, since my car was ready before noon, the front desk employee being very helpful, and I felt I was heard via Twitter, I decided to tweet some love back. You don't want to leave a negative impression, especially if they have great customer service! I knew Nissan got it because they re-tweeted it to their 3000+ followers.

Be Influential to Begin With
I do not have Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga type of followers, but I do have a good network of people who are influential. If I didn't, I'm not too sure if Nissan would have taken notice. It did help that a friend replied to my tweet and also mentioned @NissanCanada. Thanks friend, you know who you are!

The Result
At the end of the day, I, the customer, was happy, and Nissan got some positive tweets. But what was unexpected was that later on in the day, my local Nissan service center called back and left a message with my wife saying that because of the scheduling delay, they decided that the next time I take my car in for service, they will give the oil change for free (~$40 value). They felt included to add that they decided to give me the free oil change because of my tweet.  =D That is a company that goes the extra mile. Thanks Nissan Canada!

Social media and Joseph Kony

The past couple of days, awareness of Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army has went viral with a movie made by Invisible Children, an organization focused on stopping Joseph Kony.

Photo by SPangborn

Vimeo stats of the Kony 2012 movie

Although there has been controversy about the whole campaign, the use of social media has been fascinating to watch. In just a few days, views of the centerpiece movie on Kony jumped from 8 views to 58,000 to 2.7 million to 8.2 million views on March 7, 2012.

It is no surprise that social media enabled this strategy to gain so much traction in just a few short days. Smart use of the tools, like empowering readers to participate in speaking to "culturemakers" and policymakers to ask them to do something about Kony via Twitter, helps spread this campaign like wildfire.

What can my and other organizations learn from this?

Canadian Member of Parliament, Tony Clement was influenced

Without an organization embracing social media in the first place, the opportunity to speak into a social media phenomenon is lost. An example like this shows quite clearly that culture is already using social media tools and it will be that much harder if we don't use it.  (An aside thought: What if hundreds of our leaders and volunteers were able to speak into this by offering a different viewpoint by adding the hashtag #stopkony or #kony2012 to their tweets?)  Getting on the bandwagon right now is too late. We must be social media ready.

Clarity of content/cause is key. The Invisible Children's site and content really made this campaign succeed. I was impressed by the professional presentation and the clear message when spending a brief few minutes on the site. I have not watched the movie, but it has been shared to me via Facebook and Twitter over 10+ times with recommendations to watch it.

Is your organization ready to speak into something like Kony2012 or create a cause that can spread like it?  If not, how can you get to the point so that your organization can?  Would love to hear your thoughts.
   

The Other Jeremy Lin Effect

photo by teamstickergiant

If you are a fan of the NBA and of Jeremy Lin, no doubt you would have followed the numerous amount of articles and videos created about Lin.  Two of the more humorous ones are the Fung Brother's The Jeremy Lin Effect and The Jeremy Lin Effect 2 (Linsanity).

However, as I follow this great story, I can't help but speculate of the other Jeremy Lin effect - the effect it can have on world missions.  Lin is a follower of Jesus Christ and is not afraid to say it in front of cameras.  Combine that and basketball's worldwide popularity and Lin's Asian (non-Caucasian) heritage and we have a great opportunity to start gospel themed conversations.

Having gone to two Asian countries for missions, my experience is that sports is a great common topic to start conversations around.  Most countries are sports crazy and basketball is usually near the top of the list.  With Lin's rise to fame, it can be very easy to talk him and bring up his faith in God and Jesus.

Here are some intros to get the discussion going, keeping in mind that some people are in various stages in their journey of discovering Jesus:

• Jeremy Lin thanks God and Jesus in some of his interviews.  What do you think God and Jesus has to do with Lin's success?
• The general population seems to like underdog stories like Lin's.  The Gospels in the Bible seem to paint a picture of Jesus as an underdog.  Do you think Jesus is an underdog?  How would you describe Jesus; who do you think Jesus is?
• Lin so far has stayed humble and focused on being true to himself during all the media attention.  He attributes it to the reality that his identity is found in Christ (1:50) and not in basketball.  What/who do you find your identity in and does it help you stay grounded and focused?  What would your life be like if your identity was found in Jesus? 

Even though some of the questions people may have no clue as to how to answer (ex/ the last question above), I think they would be great conversation starters, even here in North America.

Other suggestions on how to segue into gospel-themed conversations with the Jeremy Lin effect?  

Whether Jeremy knows it or not, I think his play on the court can increase the opportunities to help others discover Jesus. 

Using Calendar Invites to Save Time in Setting Up Appointments Across Time Zones

photo by photosteve101

My wife recently shared to me the difficulty of scheduling meetings over different time zones - especially with people who travel over different time zones and set meetings without specifying which time zone they will be in on the day of the meeting.  After 2 missed meetings, my wife finally was able to connect with this person, but that certainly can be frustrating a time consuming.

How to overcome this confusion?  Send a calendar invite.  I use calendar invites within Google all the time and especially with co-workers to take the advantage of the "Find a Time" feature as it shares their busy/free times on their calendar.

Find a time, create the appointment and send it away and the request goes out with the right time zones.  When the team member receives the request, it will translate to whatever his/her time zone is.  It clears up confusion and gets saves missing appointments and re-scheduling.

How have you overcome the confusion of setting up appointments and meetings cross time zones? 

The Modern Meeting

Photo by thinkpanama

The past 2 days were one of the most productive meetings that I have attended for some time.  Part of it was because some of us have read some principles from the Modern Meeting.  Here are 3 points on why I think it was a successful time.

1) The leader had a decision that we could discuss and implement.  

Modern meetings are more effective when a decision is the starting point to either debate or implement.   Instead of spending hours brainstorming and evaluating different decisions, a decision was made and the team had something to refine, debate, and/or implement.

2) We had group work sessions

Instead of attacking an issue with the whole team, the leader split the group into group work sessions.  It was not a "meeting" but a time where team members were "making hay" (i.e. getting work done) along side each other.  As a result we had a plan and action points to present and confirm in the next block of meetings.

3) We had a distinct time for brainstorm

Although usually recommended for those who are not directly responsible for the outcomes of suggestions coming out of a brainstorm, it was great to have a time where there was freedom to think through what our team can do.  It involves creativity and dreaming which was a welcome break from the other agenda items.  I think this brainstorm session worked because participants knew that just because they thought of something, it didn't mean that they were going to tasked to do it.  There is freedom when that environment is established for creative and helpful brainstorm.

There are other things that were implemented and other things we could improve on, but I was greatly encouraged by the new approach to meetings.  What are some meeting tips that you recommend that has helped meetings you attend to be highly effective?

Google, Failure and Platforms

Photo from Sixth Lie

After reading an article on Google's inability to be accessible, I started to muse how Google will survive the failures of Wave and now Buzz.

It has been said that failing forward makes way for success down the road, but that means that you need to learn from your failures.  But Google doesn't seem to be doing that with 2 big flops and from the rant, I wonder if the message wasn't getting through to Google.  Perhaps Yegge was what Google needed to right the ship.

In the long run, I think Google will hold its own and succeed, but in the short-term will navigate these failures and move on.  They are too big to consider the latest strings of failures to be fatal.

What I appreciated about Yegge's rant was that it made me and a colleague think through what is our online platform to share Jesus Christ.   Do we have a platform that we use and "eat our own dogfood" as well?  Are we making it accessible so that so called "third-parties" can use it to help share Christ themselves?

It may seem odd to some that we need to think this way, but I think we need to look how we can create a platform to share Jesus to as many people as possible and I do think that means looking at an online platform that can multiply the task of bringing the Good News of Jesus.