Social networking has been a media buzz word over the last few years. Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter are connecting friends, businesses and information through the World Wide Web via any device, anytime and anywhere. I personally think social media is in its infancy and yet to be fully tapped. This is what makes it such an exciting topic to follow. In mid December I had the opportunity to experiment with this technology in a non-conventional way. The outcome was a viable model for harnessing the power of social networking within communities, businesses and organizations to achieve results.
Here’s how we did it -
* The Challenge *
A Central New York family of twelve lost everything in a fire in the middle of winter and needed the help of the community. Unfortunately every possession was lost, the children only had the clothes on their back and some evacuated without shoes into the snow covered streets. When hearing this tragic news, the number of children involved, and losing every possession including car keys, it was a moment in my life that I felt the need to step up. My next immediate thought was “What could I do to help?” And within seconds I was planning to use a social networking solution.
* Action Taken *
I choose Facebook as the social medium because that network had the largest number of community members within my network who could provide local support for the victims. It all started as a simple note and making friends aware. The family needs were clothing, nonperishable foods, toys, financial gifts and a key ingredient of helping us spread the word.
Within minutes of our first post, a flood of questions came in from the network. Within hours we had over one hundred members participating. Until this event I never truly felt tapped into the sheer power of social networking on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
The first thing we did was coordinate with volunteers and local businesses to identify drop zones for donations. Next we conducted a needs assessment with the family for ages, gender, shirts size, pants size, and shoes size. This information was then updated on a newly created group called the Angel Donations Network. The use of a group vs. a note gave us several advantages for administrative control and communication over the project.
Then something special happened as donations began to pour in on the first day. Traditional media outlets learned of our use of the social networking tools to help the family and this created a viral media buzz. For some reason traditional media loves writing about social networking. This resulted in people joining Facebook through traditional media awareness such as television and newspaper. It was very exciting being able to harness on a small scale the power of social networking, turning what started as a dripping faucet of data, into a full water main break of information flow by Facebook members. This presented one of our biggest challenges, controlling the information of the social network.
As donations came in volunteers kept inventories and relayed data from the donation drop zones to the Facebook inventory. We learned to control the information through the use of well crafted press releases posted to the Facebook group. The press releases served as what I call a “valve”. The press release valves gave us control over the flow of activity and information. After this discovery we now had the ability to turn a dripping faucet into a full water main break of information flow on command. This served as an effective tool in the project.
* The Results *
As in any project, this didn’t go without logistical challenges but some amazing social networking lessons were learned while using social media. In the end social networking helped catalyze traditional media and successfully rallied an online community around donating all basic needs for the family within 4 days.
The first lesson learned from this experiment was the speed that we were able to enlist the help of community members. Within minutes we began helping this family. Very few phone calls and most communication happened by social media.
The second lesson was the level of awareness we could achieve by using social media. Each member of the Facebook group was able to stay up to date with posted statuses as the family was helped. This allowed for easy viewing of outstanding donation needs against current inventory levels. From a management standpoint this was vital to in achieving our objectives responsibly.
The third lesson was choosing the correct mediums, frequency, and timing around using each. I viewed this as situational. In this experiment we used Facebook notes then shifted gears to a group to allow more advanced features of control.
The forth lesson was balancing traditional media with social media at a low cost or no cost based on the “buzz” of what you are doing. Traditional media is always looking for a good story to fill a newspaper or evening news spot so exploit that gently.
Lastly and probably the most important lesson was learning to control the flow of information by carefully crafting press releases in the Facebook group. This served as a valve for speeding up and slowing down the flow of efforts and activities based on needs. This allowed us to effectively communicate the message at specific frequencies and outline specific actions the group could help with. It gave everyone direction and turned what could be chaos into social harmony.
* Summary *
Social networking has many uses and can be very powerful. I believe we’ve only seen the tip of the ice berg on harnessing its true value within communities, businesses and organizations. Since this event I’ve had the opportunity to use this model to help a small business build its clientele base and develop a means for effectively communicating messages outside the use of traditional mediums. While both projects are small in scope it has yielded the results we set out to achieve in both cases. The next time you have a community or business challenge try tapping into the power of social networking as a solution or compliment to the main plan.
We’d like to hear from you on how you’ve tapped into the power of social networking? How are you using social media?
