Charities make money through Twitter

If you want to do some good whilst shortening your URLs then why not take a look at Good.ly.

Good.ly allows chosen charities to generate money from product recommendations (made through the shortened URLs).  The current charities benefiting from Good.ly are Dogs Trust, Crisis and Child Voice International.

Good.ly

If you use Good.ly to make a product recommendation on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else, and people click on and buy what you suggest, we give 55% of any earned referral fees to charity. The other 45% is used to run the service and continue marketing it. A simple purchase of anything recommended via a Good.ly link could raise cash for charities.

If you’re a charity that would like to be featured on the site then why not get in touch with them http://good.ly/applynow.

The importance of “listening” on the web

Photo by Theory at www.flickr.com/photos/theory

[Cross posted from the Third Sector Foresight website and updated from a previous post on this blog].

For many organisations, making the best use of the most basic ICT can be a struggle, let alone starting to think about how they might use social media tools.  The reality is that with more and more information and discussions online, those that don’t engage are likely to miss out.

Government departments are already posting their new policies and initiatives online, local CVS are keeping their websites up to date with the latest funding opportunities and people are discussing the work that you do online.

Can you afford to not receive this information?  Should you be letting these conversations happen without your input?  Using information in this way is only going to increase so getting to grips with it is vital.

Getting started with social media needn’t be a big step, in fact organisations should probably start small until they get the hang of it.  Even if you’re not confident in (or even interested in) setting up a blog or joining a social networking site there is a mass of information out there that could help you to do your job more effectively.

You can broadly categorise five stages of engaging with social media, each subsequent step requiring more time per week to maintain:

• Listening
• Participating
• Generating a buzz
• Sharing content
• Building communities

Getting started with listening is easy, the initial steps are:

Set up an RSS feed reader account

The key tool behind listening is RSS, sending any new web based information straight to you, saving you time from both searching for information and only seeing what’s relevant.  To use RSS you’ll need to set up a feed reader, either something web based like Bloglines or if you use an internet browser like IE7 or Firefox, it’s already built in.

Sign up to RSS news feeds

The square orange RSS logo indicates that a website it set up to enable RSS feeds.  You might choose to get started with some key news sites like BBC, Communities and Local Government, NCVO or Third Sector Foresight.  In no time at all you will identify other sites you want to follow and you simply add them.

 

Read blogs

Blogs are free and easy to set up and allow people to talk about what they’re interested in.  If people are using blogs to talk about your area, your field of work or even your organisation, don’t you want to know about it?

The easiest way to find blogs is to start with one and then see who they link to.  If you want somewhere to start then why not try NCVO’s Public Service Delivery Network blog.

You can also search for blogs specifically within Google.

Set up key word searches

Searching for keywords can often throw up useful information on the internet, especially if your keyword is fairly unique (such as “NCVO” or “foresight”).

You can save a Google blog search to continually look for your keyword and email you with the result.

Twitter is increasingly hosting conversations that we should be listening to, you can set up your own Twitter search and even feed the results into your RSS feed reader.

Do all of these at once!

A really useful comment from Dave Briggs below pointed out the Addict-o-matic website which does a lot of this “listening” all at once.

Go to http://addictomatic.com/ and put in your keyword, it might be your organisation’s name or something about the work you do … and see the results come in.

Further information

There are loads more excellent resources to help you listen on the web and I’ve saved them at http://delicious.com/ICT_Hub/listening.  You might also want to download a copy of the “How to use new media” guide.

Twitter mosaic

Thanks to @digitalmaverick for pointing out the slightly pointless Twitter mosaic tool, I couldn’t resist giving it a go.  These are my followers … what a lovely bunch!

The future’s bright, the future’s Twitter

[cross posted from www.3s4.org.uk]

2009 has already been a big year for Twitter and it’s only February.  With people like Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross discussing it on national TV and radio, new accounts are being registered in their thousands.  But what is Twitter and can it really be of any use to the voluntary and community sector?

Twitter is a difficult beast to explain but essentially it’s a micro-blogging tool.  It allows you to post “tweets” with a maximum of 140 characters, reply to other posts that are of interest and follow what others are saying.  It’s easy to build a network of people with similar interests and opinions to you by seeing who others are talking to.  What started with asking the question “what are you doing?” is turning into a key social media tool.

This week alone has been extraordinary in Twitter land.  On Monday we woke up to the thickest covering of snow in London for 18 years and almost immediately people were rating the snow cover in their area out of 10, with results feeding into the #uksnow map.  I used Twitter that morning to find out what was really happening on the trains and on realising we were going to be stuck at home everyone used it to share their pictures of snowmen.  Just last night Stephen Fry got stuck in a lift and kept the world informed about the ordeal through Twitter.  The whole story made it into The Sun.

What might seem like idle time wasting to some only builds on the sense of community between users.  Twitter users working in the voluntary sector are already meeting at an NFP tweetup (using the American acronym for the sector) to talk face to face about issues affecting them.  In this case Twitter is only the tool which facilitates real life discussion.

But what of voluntary organisations?  Can Twitter really be of use?  Organisations such as Bullying UK, the RSPB, Amnesty UK, Voluntary Action Manchester and Dogs Trust certainly think so.  These are just a few of the VCOs using Twitter to get their message out.  These organisations have already used Twitter to update supporters with news, launch campaigns, recruit volunteers, advertise events, ask people to write letters of support, share pictures and stories and seek comment on consultations.  The interconnecting networks of users help organisations to spread their message far and wide.

The best way to understand how Twitter might work for you is to try it out, so why not get started by following someone and then see where they lead you.  The contacts quickly build up and the conversations start.  If you need someone to follow then why not try http://twitter.com/NCVOForesight.

There’s more information about Twitter and how to get started in the How to use new media guide on the ICT website.  Other information about Twitter is bookmarked at http://delicious.com/ICT_Hub/twitter.

Collaborative working conference – web 2.0 session

[apologies for this being posted a bit later than it should have been]

Into the first workshop … Michelle McMahon from Ammado is asking us all about if and how we are using web 2.0.  The experiences vary from users who are passionate to users who are sceptical to people who don’t know yet if it’s for them … my only thought at the moment is that I hope that I’m not annoying anyone with my continuous tapping

There’s an interesting range of what people what to get out of this session; there is talk of using web 2.0 to interact with members, to communicate internally and also to get a better general understanding of what all of these tools are and how they can be used.

So, what is web 2.0?  Web 2.0 is participatory, it is about people creating and sharing online.  At the start of the internet it was talked of as the information age, now it should be thought of as the participatory age.

An interesting thought to start the session, how do people communicate with a ketchup bottle online?

Michelle’s favourite examples of web 2.0 sites at the moment are http://wetellstories.co.uk, a Penguin site which used popular authors to create new stories online, with input from the public.  The site had the effect of raising the profile of both Penguin and the authors involved.  The second highlighted site was for the Obama ‘08 campaign http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hqblog/, rallying support of people online – the site featured an Obama ringtone .. I’m interested to hear what that sounded like.  http://worldwithoutoil.orgis a site which simulated what might happen during a global oil crisis.  For once at a conference the internet is working and Michelle is showing some footage from You Tube from the World Without Oil site.

Some of the other examples of web 2.0 in action included …

• Organisations such as the NSPCC using fan pages on Facebook to attract supporters 
• Ebay, working with Mission Fish to administer donations from items sold on Ebay
• Community pages on the Ammado site for various causes, promoting calls to action through widgets which can be shared on other social networking spaces
• The Born in September twitter campaign, raising money for Charity Water by targeting people who were born in september
• powergramo - allowing you to create podcasts using skype
• Kiva - a site which uses donations to fund micro loans around the world

Some of the delegates had their own experiences of web 2.0, which included …

• Using a blog to answer questions that you’re constantly asked so that you don’t waste time repeating yourself – you can also link to other sources of useful information
• Blogging about work which can attract local newspapers in search of a story
• Smaller charities using free blogs (like wordpress.com or typepad) instead of a website, there is some of the basic functionality of websites

As with all workshops in every conference ever we started to run over time and my stomach was becoming quite vocal as lunch approached.  Michelle looked briefly at future trends affecting web 2.0, such as the increasing visibility of charity – company online relationships.

Off to lunch …