The Evangelical Right & Aid Relief in Fragile Nations

Over the past few months we’ve undertaken, on our own, a project to map the use of social media by the evangelical right. Part of our research has been how Christian/evangelical non-profit aid groups are engaging in aid delivery in fragile nations and post-crisis states (e.g. Haiti post-earthquake.)

How Age Groups Use Social Media Differently

Over 30? Well, you prefer text-based content, you’re more likely to use Flickr and you’ll fuss over photo editing but rarely record, edit and upload a video. Under 30? You love video and if you’re female you’d prefer to edit photo’s than video.

These are just some of our findings into 2010 in our ongoing look at how we’re using Social Media channels and the technologies that product content. Remember, today, everyone is a producer.

Youth: This market, under 30, prefers video to photo’s, yet interestingly enough, women prefer to edit and then share photo’s whereas boys prefer to create, record, edit and share video content. Additionally, youth (under 30) are more likely to participate in marketing promotions that have some form of participation that includes ranking content, changing content or somehow manipulating outcomes.

Adults: Those of us over 30 (sadly I’m one), well, we like to mess with photo’s more than video and we are prolific when it comes to writing. In an analysis of blogs across North America (we sampled profiles indicating 30+ to over 40,000 blogs) we found that the +30 crowd actually reads, whereas the -30 crowd prefers to massage video and watch. Interesting hey?

Marketers…if you want to engage the under 30 market segment…give them something to do with your content. That’s what they’re interested in. Over 30…stop being boring, but we’ll share your content if it’s interesting. Boring content? Don’t waste your money. The Web really is about “action” and the moment you forget that, you lose.

Want more information? Give us a holler and we can let you know what’s happening by generations or age groups and we can slice it six ways from, well, boring old Sunday.

(Author: G. Crouch)

A Crisis of Information in a Crisis?

There’s little doubt that social technologies and crowdsourcing can play a crucial role in managing information during and immediately after a natural disaster or conflict outbreak in fragile and developed nations. Services that Ushahidi offers are critical and effective.

But with more and more of these crowdsourcing and information sites evolving, will we face a crisis of information overload? Perhaps there can be too much of a good thing.

We saw the value of SMS/txt donations during the Haitian earthquake and Ushahidi being able to coordinate information. Such success was widely publicized and now we’re seeing these tools applied in the Pakistan flood crisis. Pardon the pun, but is there a flood of confusion however, on what tools are effective or where to go?

Effective crisis management has to have a central coordination point. Something UNOCHA works very hard to do. And often does very well at. So what’s happening online?

Ushahidi is leading the way, very effectively. Yet we have other systems such as the US military’s HARMONIEWeb, a Wiki type of tool. Then there’s CrisisCommons and SAHANA a platform built OpenSource and freely available.

There’s little question that these are useful and critical. But toss in blogs, Twitter and similar services, txt messaging and video blogs and the inevitable in-country tools that are rapidly developed like the floodmaps by Lahore University and the Punjab government relief site and you’ve got an overload situation.

All of this presents a serious challenge; what is the one critical mass spot that is most effective in aid coordination? Given it’s capabilities, ideally Ushahidi’s tools such as SwiftRiver.

The challenge becomes politics (governmental preferences on platform), access to broadband Internet and then the tools (laptop, software/browser) to access them along with driving awareness of their availability. Most of these tools are difficult to access in fragile states, even with limited dial-up, so txt messaging plays a vital role, but is restrictive for the mobile user. Additional issues follow, such as validity of information, missing critical insights from one platform to another and user capacity to understand these tools.

Services like Ushahidi have and are making a difference. But can you have uniformity with so many communications options available? Can you aggregate effectively? I suspect so, but it will be some time for that to happen.

Using Social Media for Sales and Prospecting: 2 Keys

In training over 300 sales people on how to use Social Media for prospecting in the past two years there are two key elements that tie together “why” use Social Media channels for sales prospecting and “how” one can have a greater chance for success. So I’ll lay them out here;

1. Evidence: When you are looking to buy something from someone, one of the first things we look for is proof that a) the person you’re dealing with has experience and has hopefully delivered on their promises before which leads to…

2. Trust: Can you trust the individual to deliver on their promise? Will they be responsible with your company’s money or your money? How reputable are they as an individual and the company they work for?

Sales is all about relationships. Relationships evolve over time but are built on trust and trust in sales starts with evidence…the proof of who you are.

This is perhaps the biggest advantage of Social Media tools being used in sales. You can more quickly build trust and provide evidence. Take a service like LinkedIn. In one of our research projects we asked 150 business decision makers what they looked for first on services like LinkedIn…85% said they first check to see if the person has recommendations. If they didn’t, they were 90% less likely to “trust” that person at first. After that they looked at their connections and how they portrayed themselves. Too little information was as bad as too much or lack of any activity.

If you’re in sales then you understand that you first have to win a prospects trust before you can “close” the sale. Social Media channels are not for “hard pitching” but they are superb ways to reduce the sales cycle by building trust.

Ask yourself; if you gave a client a list of 30 people to call to check your “evidence” of you and your company when you first spoke to them…would you? Probably not. But a quick perusal of their LinkedIn, eCademy or Plaxo profile is another matter.

(Author: G. Crouch)

Is Social Media Making People Hyper-Competitive?

You might call it “keeping up with the eJones‘” in a way. Take FourSquare for example…the more you “check in” to a place the greater a chance you can become “Mayor” until someone unseats you. Or LinkedIn with that little blue bar that says you’re “only 75% complete” for your profile…don’t you just want to push that bar to the 100% point? C’mon now, be honest.

Of course this is going to drive all those “lets make a level playing field for kids in school” educators go batty. Because even social media services like Club Penguin have “status” levels and indicators – because it is human nature to be competitive.

The value to almost all social media services (Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn etc.) is eyeballs. So how they keep eyeballs and get more eyeballs is to leverage “game theory” in the primary framework of the service.

And let’s face it, we benchmark ourselves against our social peers. Whether we like to admit it openly or not, it’s true. We look at the car we drive compared to our neighbours or peers, the clothes we wear or of course…whether someone uses a Mac or a Windows machine, Blackberry or iPhone. These things all say something about who we are and where we stand.

We’ve reached the point where socially, people seem to think you’re an odd duck if you aren’t on Facebook and not on LinkedIn if your a white collar professional.

The social media channels that will do best in the coming years will be those who figure out successfully, how to harness game theory and drive our competitive nature. Not all approaches will work with everyone, but they will appeal to certain segments. And that can be just enough to make them large and monetarally valuable to marketers or potential buyers.

So there we are…we’re all just game pieces in a set of complex games finding we now have to keep up with the Jones’ in Cyburbia as well. Funny sometimes how eLife mimics real life isn’t it?