London Tweetups (Social & Digital Media, Non-profits and Fundraising)

Image from sweetmandarin.com

Hey, so I put a shout-out on Twitter today looking for a list of regular London-based Tweetups with a focus on non-profits and social/digital media. I had a few great suggestions from @CharityChap, @Bronte_M, @RobmDyson and @JudeHabib, and @Spirals linked to the very useful Meetup.com, but I struggled to find a curated list of current Tweetups that deal with the digital side of the non-profit sector.

To remedy that, I've knocked together a Google doc that lists them along with some of their key details. I'd love you to offer your top tips, or correct any of my errors. If you do go to the trouble of helping out, please add your Twitter handle, a link to your website, or your name in the column on the far-right.

Edit this doc

Edit this doc
There are probably better, easier, automated ways to organise all of this, but I do like the personal touch, so please do only add the events that you think are pretty epic or really useful (for n00bs or experienced geeks). Cheers!

Young Trustees? No thanks!

Find out more about Trustees' Week here

That was a bold title, wasn't it? I of course don't agree with it one bit, but an article I read earlier has compelled me to write this piece (apologies for the link-bait).

David Ainsworth blogged in Third Sector today about young people and their inability to organise the proverbial in a brewery. In my opinion, one shared by those that commented on the piece, it was a collection of popular but inaccurate and crass stereotypes that do not (and that never have) accurately applied to 'young people'. David hits all of the key stereotypical touch-stones associated with young people, I won't go into them here, but I do recommend reading the piece and commenting as you feel appropriate.

Before I express my own feelings on the subject, I'd like to offer some excerpts from the comments already posted below the line on Third Sector:

Catherine Murray writes:

Trusteeship is like any other job - trustees are recruited for their expertise and for what they can bring to a board. Charities are like any other organisation - a living organism with diverse needs and projects it wants to do well. Charities therefore must have a diverse mix of people on their trustee boards, as people below have pointed out.

Leon Ward adds:

I joined the Board of Plan UK when I was 18 after spending 4 years as a young advisor. Plan is a £60m organisation. I'm also a Trustee of Leap Confronting Conflict (£1m) and Ineract Worldwide (£3m). Your views of young people are archaic and wrong. 

I blog regularly for ThirdSector and would like to direct you to that blog where I outline the benefits of young trustees:- http://leonward.thirdsector.co... you'll also find the perspective of a young trustee on several strategic issues for organisations 

I'm sure you'll agree that both Leon and Catherine are people that have their heads screwed-on, and they both happen to be young trustees as well. Not quite the drinking, unreliable, overly-emotional and forgetful young people that David describes, but I'm sure we can forgive them that.

I have the honour of working with the UK's largest voluntary youth organisation, Girlguiding UK. We have over half a million members, and everything that we do is driven by those members. We have a range of youth panels that steer the work of the organisation, and each year for the last four years we have released a major piece of research, the Girls' Attitudes Survey, that is designed and developed by our young members.

Our young members have attended and spoken at events such as Rio+20 and CSW 56, and we have one member due to attend the climate change talks in Qatar later this year. Some of our members are part of groups such as the British Youth Council, many of them have petitioned government on issues important to young people. These young people are not the people that David Ainsworth describes, these are highly engaged, political and community-conscious young people with amazing levels of drive and a determination to help make the world a better place.

David, in this case, is selling young people short.

PS - I do really enjoy reading Third Sector, I find it an immensely valuable resource, and I am also confident that the majority of David's contributions are on-the-money (Just not the one that I refer to here)
   

“PR should own social media” Yes! It should, but...

This piece references a beautifully frank interview with Martin Harrison by Craig McGill at The Drum – I fully recommend reading it, and then coming back to read this piece, if you’re so inclined.

The question you might ask is; “If social media doesn’t sit in PR, where the heck does it sit?”

Well, I’ve spent a little over three years, spanning two jobs and some freelance bits-and-bobs, working in social media roles. In both full-time jobs, my role began in the Web Team, and was then moved to the Press Team. In both cases, I worked very closely with the Press Team whilst I was seconded to the Web Team, and then worked very closely with the Web Team when my role moved to the Press Team. My freelance work is usually commissioned by the Press or Marketing Teams of the organisations that I work with.

It’s interesting, the core function of a social media guy or gal is to communicate, usually to speak on behalf of the organisation through branded accounts (I know the role is far more complicated than that, but talking to people online on behalf of your organisation is the basest, most simplified way of describing what people like me do to put bread on the table). That voice, or at least the person/s responsible for the formation and development of that voice, should sit within the Press Team, absolutely no question about that.

Having said that, the best social media people also have a working understanding of SEO, HTML and image editing software (Photoshop etc), and the really good ones might be able to turn their hand to some programming as well. It is this understanding of the technical side of online that can really help to drive creativity and deliver campaigns that really have an impact.   

Your social media manager/strategist/other should sit with the Press Office peeps, but he or she MUST have direct communication channels with your Web Team, Customer Support Team, and any other people that speak on behalf of the organisation in any role – From your Chief Exec to an intern helping to draft some copy for the website.

The key is to ensure that your social media person is adept at razing silos to the ground, developing/fixing/maturing internal comms channels, and being able to do all this whilst developing positive relationships with key members of key teams within your organisation, rather than harming them.

Does your organisation’s social media role sit somewhere other than the Press Team? If so, where does it sit, and why?

So, your organisation is going social (Part one)

This post is the first in a short series on setting up and managing a social media presence for your organisation, you can find the rest here.


You’re a social media evangelist in an organisation that doesn’t have a social media presence, you’ve managed to convince your boss that it’s essential to start doing that Twitter thing, now what?

Well, the bad news is that you’re behind the curve, with 94% of corporates and over 90% of non-profits already using social media. The good news is you can learn from the mistakes already made and make the most of a swath of best-practice case studies. Before all that, there are a few key questions you should ask:

Why are you getting on board with social media?

If the answer is “because everyone else is”, you need to rethink your position. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t jump on board, but you should have a sound business case. Good reasons for developing a presence in the social sphere might be:

• To increase brand visibility/awareness
• Develop leads and drive sales/subscriptions
• Strengthen campaigns
• Improve customer service
• Network with key stakeholders

There are loads more reasons, and your strategic plan should be able to help you identify them. The initial reasons you outline can help you to develop your key performance indicators and create a formula to measure return on investment.

Who’s going to manage it?

This is one of the key questions, who do you trust to be able to manage both the technical and communications side of engaging with people on behalf of your organisation online?

Ideally, you’ll be in a position to appoint at least one full-time person to manage social media. Speaking in the most basic terms, you have two options from here:

• Appointing someone internally that may make a fantastic online ambassador
• Appointing a social media professional from outside 

Both of these options have pros and cons, a professional new to the organisation may take a little time to familiarise themselves with the organisation (although, you would hope they do much of this before they take up the role), whilst appointing someone internally may mean you run the risk of some early social media faux pas and that you may need additional investment to cover training.

What channels will you use?

If you hire a social media professional, they will be able to help you make the right decisions. The right channels will be influenced by your demographics, your sector and your ability to produce content. I’m a big fan of experimenting with new channels (usually with a personal profile initially), but one thing that you should avoid is spreading yourself too thinly across too many platforms.

Interesting Twitter update - Changes to ToS and Privacy Policy

Just received an interesting update from Twitter - changes to ToS and the privacy policy. It sounds like they're being more open (and I do have a lot of respect for the lengths Twitter will go to to protect their users), but what do you think?  Message follows: Hi Paul Darigan, New things are always happening here at Twitter HQ. We're growing at a rapid pace, and our commitment to simplicity, transparency, and reaching every person on the planet continues. We thought you might be interested in knowing about some of our most recent developments:

A new weekly email that delivers the most interesting news and items you might have missed from the people you're connected to on Twitter. Now Twitter is in more languages than ever. Check for your preferred language and change your setting. Download the latest Twitter mobile apps at twitter.com/download. There's more to Discover on Twitter.com - try out the new Discover tab.

In addition, we've made a number of updates to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Here are some of the main changes to our Privacy Policy, with links for more information:

We've provided more details about the information we collect and how we use it to deliver our services and to improve Twitter. One example: our new tailored suggestions feature, which is based on your recent visits to websites that integrate Twitter buttons or widgets, is an experiment that we're beginning to roll out to some users in a number of countries. Learn more here. We've noted the many ways you can set your preferences to limit, modify or remove the information we collect. For example, we now support the Do Not Track (DNT) browser setting, which stops the collection of information used for tailored suggestions. We've clarified the limited circumstances in which your information may be shared with others (for example, when you've given us permission to do so, or when the data itself is not private or personal). Importantly, our privacy policy is not intended to limit your rights to object to a third party's request for your information.

In our Terms of Service, we've clarified how your relationship with Twitter works and made a number of small changes and formatting improvements, such as new headings for easy reference and updated descriptions of our services.

Take a moment to read our new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, and thanks for using Twitter.

The Twitter Team

Twitter Visualisation Tools - In Action

Holding an event? Inviting people to tweet to a hashtag? Want to display those tweets? Great!

I've pulled together a list of different Twitter visualisation tools beneath - Some of them look pretty cool, others are a little bit dull but functional. Anyway, check them out, let me know what you think.

Note: In all examples, I've chosen to display tweets for the #ff hashtag - I don't endorse any tweets that appear, blah blah blah, etc.

1. Visible Tweets

I came across Visible Tweets a few weeks ago and I really like it. You can choose from three different types of animation and all of them are attractive. The one downside is that it is necessarily a little bit slow cycling through tweets, so don't expect it to pick up and display every tweet if you're hosting a popular event.

2. Twitter Search Widget

The Twitter Search Widget might not be quite as attractive as Visual Tweets, but it does allow you a great degree of personalisation. You can edit its dimensions, colour, frequency of updates, and much more.

3. Twitter Fountain

Twitter Fountain is a handy tool, it pulls in hashtagged tweets and mashes them up with images from Flickr. There are lots of different display options that you can fiddle with.
 

There are more Twitter visualisation tools that I either can't embed on the blog or haven't paid for, but that I believe are still worth a look:

• Twitterfall - Basic but functional, although it does scroll a little too quickly for my liking (Free)
• TweetWall Pro - Looks very impressive, lots of different themes (Free trial, paid for thereafter)
• Revisit - Well worth a look, really interesting layout and it 'emphasizes conversational threads' (Free)

That's it from me for the moment. Let me know if you've got any more event-oriented visualisation tools to add to the list above.

Twitter Basics: Counting your click-throughs

Here we go, the first of a series of posts covering some social media basics.

There are lots of great tools for posting and measuring clicks on links in tweets, the free versions of which often provide a good but limited service - I fully recommend checking out Buffer and Hootsuite.

However, if you don't have any budget, but need to record these statistics, Tweetdeck and Bitly work really well together. Here's how you sync them:

1. Create a Tweetdeck account and add your profile/s to it. You can download Tweetdeck to your desktop, use the Tweetdeck web app, or install Tweetdeck for Chrome (my personal favourite).

2. Create a Bitly account.

3. When you've created your Bitly account, click on 'Settings', scroll down the page and find your API key (a long combination of letters and numbers). Copy this and open Tweetdeck.

4. When you're in Tweetdeck, click on 'Settings' and then 'Services':

• Set your 'Link Shortening' service to 'bit.ly'
• Enter your Bitly username
• Paste in your Bitly API key

5. When you've saved those changes, any links that you tweet from Tweetdeck will automatically be shortened using your Bitly account (yay).You can measure the click-throughs on these links by logging in to your Bitly account.

So, what do you think - Is that useful, do you have any other/betters tools, tips or solutions? I've got a feeling that some people will flag-up Google Analytics as a solution, and it certainly is a really strong, free tool - Have you got any Google Analytics tips for measuring the impact of your social media presence?

Channel 4's exclusive Prometheus trailer in numbers

Channel 4's Prometheus trailer, heralded as a world first and broadcast during Homeland on 29th April, generated some interesting figures (The Homeland episode of 29th April had 2.87 million viewers).

3 minute-long trailer

40 seconds of viewers' tweets displayed during the following ad-break

4,000 hashtagged tweets

15,000,000 potential hashtag reach

1 Ofcom investigation

Missed the trailer? Watch it below

@LASAICT's #lasatechtools tweetchat - Making to most of online tools in the third sector

Today's LASA Tech Tools tweetchat (kicking off at 12:30 GMT, 2nd May) sounds promising:

...Lasa will be running a Twitter chat on online tools for charities on 2 May from 12.30-14.30. This programme of events has been funded by Google. 

The tweetchat will share the latest thinking from experts in this area, who will offer tips and advice to help charities make the most of the best online tools for their needs.

LasaICT have lined up an impressive panel including Matt Collins of Beatbullying, Ross McCulloch of Be Good Be Social, Mark Walker of AbilityNet, Sylwia Presley of Barcamp Nonprofits, and Crispin Read of White Fuse Media.

* Note: The tweet chat moved so quickly that I gave up trying to Storify it and concentrated on participating instead. I'll replace the partial Storify beneath with the one created by Lasa as soon as it's available*
Now updated with Lasa's Storify:

"These views are my own..."

The caveat that graces several million Twitter bios (including my own), and that is required by just about every social media policy going.

Now that I’ve added that disclaimer to my bio, I’m free to turn the twittersphere blue, endorse politically-incorrect causes and indulge in tweeting some offensive ‘jokes’... right?

Wrong.

Everything you post says something about you and adds to your overall digital footprint, which can say a lot about you. Check it out - Google yourself and see what you find, I’ll wait...

... Done? Did you like what you saw? Would a current or potential employer like it? Would clients or customers of that employer like it? You had better hope so, because it reflects on them as well.

If I see an employee of a charity posting offensive comments online, am I more or less likely to donate money or volunteer with that charity?

If my broadband contract is up for renewal and I see that a customer support officer at ‘Broadband Provider X’ tends to tweet highly offensive jokes, am I going to want to deal with that person when my connection drops?

Those examples may be trite, but if your employer has seen fit to employ you, that is both an endorsement of your skill-set and of your personality.

But I don’t reference my job in my bio

That doesn’t really matter I’m afraid. In the vast majority of cases it just takes a quick search and a few clicks to find the person behind the twitter account and to figure out where they work.

That all sounds a bit depressing

It doesn’t have to be. Protecting your employer by being careful with your posts also protects you. It helps you to avoid tweeting a stream of expletives when your football team concedes a goal and it helps to stop you getting involved in pointless spats online.

I dislike the term ‘personal brand’, but it does have a place here. Do your online posts reflect the personal brand that you would like to present and market?

---

*Disclaimer* The tone of tweets mentioned in the second paragraph are not indicative of the sort of content I would like to be able to tweet. The sort of tweets that I want to (and do) post are sometimes a little bit grouchy, but mostly pretty safe (some might even use the term ‘dull’)

Measuring a Twitter Campaign on a Budget

Great, you’ve designed a Twitter campaign that you’re sure is going to go viral, now all you need to do is work out how you’re going to measure it.

The first thing you need to do is work out what your ‘done’ is. Is your campaign about your hashtag reaching as wide an audience as possible, is it about attracting more Twitter followers, collecting stories, or is it about driving people to a conversion page?

Hashtag Stats

Measuring stats on a hashtag is rarely a terribly useful metric, but it does have merits when used in conjunction with other key performance indicators. I use Hashtracking to measure the hashtag stats side of any campaign. The free service will measure up to 1,500 tweets over a 24-hour period. If you think your campaign will top-out at over 1,500 tweets or go on for more than 24-hours, I recommend using their paid-for service (currently $40USD).

Hashtracking will measure the number of tweets containing your hashtag, the reach of those tweets, and the impressions they generate.

This may go without saying, but if you want reliable stats on your hashtag ensure that your hashtag is unique to your campaign.

Twitter Followers

Well this is easy, you can take note of your followers before the campaign starts, and again when it’s finished. If that sounds a bit too much like hard work, you can always turn to Twitter Counter (they’ll even give you a graph).

Collecting Stories

Asking people to tweet their stories to a hashtag can be a great way of sourcing case-studies and identifying online ambassadors. Storify is a great free way to publicly curate these stories.

Conversions

This comes down to your on-site analytics package. Google Analytics is a great free tool and the good people at Google have some really useful resources to help you get started.

One final note before you kick-off your campaign – Read the Twitter “Guidelines for Contests onTwitter”

Slacktivist or online activist?

Now, chances are you’ve already seen the infographic below on Mashable, and I don’t intend to do a copy-pasta job on their content. What I will do is borrow some insight from one of my colleagues, Jo Hobbs, and ask – Is “slacktivism” really an appropriate term, or is “clicktivism” more accurate?

Slacktivism suggests a lack of engagement and a lack of real-world action, but, as is made clear by the stats in the infographic beneath, this isn’t necessarily true of online activists. These figures/stats suggest that there is a great deal of value to be had from an audience of online activists, and that the passive term “Slacktivists” simply will not do – These people are active and passionate, they are “Clicktivists”.

Decision Engines - The Impact of Online Research

Is your website up to scratch?

It had better be. Check out this infographic from Sortable.com:

• 87% of people research products online
• 72% of people abandon a website for a competitor to do more research...

Infographic borrowed from Sortable (Great infograph, but does contain some sales fluff):

Some Infographic Fun

I'm on the look-out for great data visualisation tools - I love data and clever data visualisations but my modest Photoshop skills don't really cut it when it comes to turning interesting data in to engaging data-visualisations.

My first port-of-call is Visual.ly - A tool that automatically creates infographics based on your social media presence. They say:

"Visualizations are powerful, but they’ve required time and hard work to create -- until now. You no longer need expensive software, extensive design skills, or number crunching ability. We’re building a tool that will allow everyone to quickly and easily create professional quality designs with their own data. And when you’re ready to show your work to the world, publish it on your Visual.ly profile, your own personal showcase."

The infographic below represents my Twitter presence. Clearly some of the data has not been pulled in properly, and that's a shame, but for a free tool that takes a few moments to create an infographic, it ain't half bad.

Team follow-back and naive social media ‘professionals’

I received a rather depressing LinkedIn Group email the other day. I won’t name names, but it was a group for social media professionals. The top threads, in order, were:

1. A Twitter follow-back thread
2. A Facebook Fanpage mutual-like thread
3. A Facebook Fanpage mutual-like thread
4. A Facebook Fanpage mutual-like thread
5.  ... well, you get the idea

I have no doubt that there are many similar threads across a range of LinkedIn Groups.  I struggle to assume good faith in these circumstances, but I do hope that these threads are based on a naive approach to social media rather than something more underhanded – We all took some time to learn the ropes when we started (didn’t we?).

It’s easy to understand the thought process behind their approach; ‘A greater Twitter following, or more likes on Facebook will mean that potential clients will take me more seriously’. This may be correct when securing a contract with a client unfamiliar with social media, but it won’t do them much good when it comes to delivering on that contract.

This results in a hoodwinked client throwing away money for a sub-par service and potentially tarring the reputation of sharp and hardworking consultants at the same time (That’s me, and possibly you if you’re reading this).

Despite a willingness to believe these threads are the work of social media noobs, the people creating and posting on these threads are advertising themselves as a mixture of social media and digital professionals - freelancers/consultants, agencies and client-side - when they clearly are not.

Rant over, if you are new to social media and fancy carving out a career in the field, check out some of these links to help you get started:

• Arie Moyal on metrics: Thank you, Wow and Done - The only 3 metrics you need 
• Arie Moyal on worrying trends: 3 Worrying Trends in Social Media - Part 1: Competitions and giveaways
• Emelyn Chand on bad practice: Cease and desist: 10 bad Twitter practices to be stopped immediately

So, what do you think: Are you a client that's been burned by a bad social media consultant experience; are you  a consultant or freelancer that's equally frustrated, or, are you someone that thinks follow-back is great? Let us know your thoughts

Social Enterprise: The BBC Updates it’s Guidelines & Takes A Big Leap Forward

This post first appeared on WhatWorksWhere.com where I have recently started occasional guest-blogging.

BBC News’ latest iteration of its Social Media Guidelines suggests the organisation is serious about moving towards becoming a truly Social Enterprise, or as Sunny Hundal candidly puts it, “social media or death”, though clarifying that with the caveat that he may be paraphrasing.

Joking aside, the guidelines state very clearly that “Understanding social media is not an optional extra for modern journalists and programme makers.” Some producers and journalists may now be checking the terms of their contract, but the savvier staff will be taking advantage of the training that BBC News has on offer.

The guidelines demonstrate a clear commitment from BBC News to provide its social media communities with quality content. “League tables” will be used to weed the weak posts from the strong, these posts will be judged by user engagement – Likes, comments and shares on Facebook, re-tweets and replies on Twitter.

The “native” post requirement is key to ensuring cross-platform quality – If you are writing a post for a BBC News Twitter account, you compose it for Twitter. Do not cross-post to Facebook and vice-versa.

This latest set of social media guidelines from the BBC provides a breath of fresh air after the restrictions recently placed on their news staff.

Have you read the latest BBC News social media guidelines, what do you think? Is it a step in the right direction, have they been drafted by somebody you would trust to produce your organisation’s social media guidelines?

Social shares and trending news: A study (of sorts)

As a former student of journalism, a current social media professional, and as somebody with an unhealthy appetite for numbers, I've found a way to satiate myself this weekend with an amateurish combination of all three.

Using a week of tweets from Sunny Hundal's @RipplaNews Twitter account (more on that here), I've drawn together a rather simple data-set to provide a base for examining what news makes an impact on the social sphere, and what encourages people to share the news they share. 

Pie-charts (yum), bar-charts and other associated data-visualisations to follow:

Over-all seven-day share by news organisation:

I think it's fair to say that I'm somewhat surprised by this. I had expected the Daily Mail to have had a bigger share, and The Sun to be roughly on par with the Guardian. Bravo to the BBC for taking almost half of the social shares.

Daily number of trending tweets listed by news organisation:

Given the pie-chart above, this probably isn't terribly unexpected. That said, I would have expected a higher spike on Monday for the Guardian, given Charlie Brooker's weekly comment piece - but that might say more about my personal taste than anything else.


Number of article images measured against number of shares:

I spent some time trying to work out the best graph to display this data. I settled on this one, but I'm not entirely happy with it. To explain what it means - The blue dot in the '0' column means that there have been 12 shares of articles that had no pictures (this includes the same article/s shared twice, counting as two shares), the blue dot in the '1' column means that there have been 36 shares of articles with one image only (this includes the same article/s shared twice, counting as two shares), and so on.


This scatter chart has been skewed somewhat by a single 40-image article. It featured four times as a trending news article. It was part of the Daily Mail's coverage of Whitney Huston's death. That aside, it is clear that the most frequent shares come with articles that contain between 0-2 images. 


This is a misleading statistic though, given that few online articles (Daily Mail excluded) will contain three or more images, making it more likely that 'most-shared' articles would fall within this 0-2 image band. There are a range of variables here that I simply don't have the time to explore, but if you fancy it...


So, what does this mean?
I'm not really sure, although, if you're vaguely interested in this sort of measurement, please feel free to use the data (linked below), expand on it, improve it, and present it in a more sensible fashion

Get the raw data: You can view the raw data on Google Docs.

About this data: This data covers the top trending online news stories by measuring their social shares. The source for this data is Sunny Hundal's Rippla News application (http://rippla.com/). Details on how Rippla News works can be found here: http://rippla.com/ripples.php. This data has been recovered from the updates on the @RipplaNews twitter feed. This blog post (and linked data) is an example of a very simplistic way of examining the Rippla News data - It does not take full advantage of the rich data available on the Rippla News website.

Collection Timeframe: This data covers one week of retrievable tweets (78 Tweets), from 12:00pm Sunday 12 February to 12:00pm Sunday 19 February

Disclaimer: I make absolutely no claim that this is an exhaustive piece of reliable research, nor do I claim to be a researcher in any sort of professional sense. The data collection method  is imperfect, and the classification of the different strands of information is , in parts, highly flawed (For example, the terms in the "Category" column) - This data is also reliant on what I would assume would be referred to as a small sample set. The intention was to catalogue trending news in order to gain an insight in to what news tends to trend, and to perhaps allow me (or anybody else that cares to explore it) to identify themes in the social share trends of online news.

Sources: All sources are clearly referenced by way of hyperlinks in the raw data.

Re-use of data: If you find this data to be in any way interesting, please feel free to re-use, refine and redistribute this data freely in part or in whole. A credit to @pdarigan would be nice, but is by no means necessary. I would ask that you do reference the Rippla News application, either by way of a link to the Twitter feed or website (That's where the real effort went in, and I can't claim any credit at all for that).

#NFPtweetup 16/02/2012

I've quickly Storified the last hour or so of (personally speaking) key tweets from the #NFPtweetup hosted by @NFPtweetup this evening. It isn't perfect, Storify only allowed me to go back so far, and the event generated loads of tweets.

Apologies to #NFPtweetup tweeters that I haven't listed here, it is a highly subjective list of messages that resonated with me for one reason or another. I am convinced, following tonight's event, that I absolutely must sign up for the next one.

Congrats to all involved, it was terrific to follow on Twitter, so I can only imagine how good it was to be there. Details of the next event will be available here, as and when

What news is buzzing in the social sphere?

Rippla News Logo | Sunny Hundal; Rippla News

Well, you need look no further than Rippla News, a tool created by Sunny Hundal. Rippla News aggregates the social shares of news stories and tweets hourly updates about which stories are trending at the moment:

“Every hour, RIPPLA retrieves and evaluates thousands of news stories from across the British media that were published in the last 24 hours, and rates them by their impact.”

Rippla is still in Beta, and problems with its algorithm have appeared (Noticeably, the tendency of the Daily Mail to re-publish articles, apparently automatically), but by-and-large, Rippla News offers an intriguing insight in to what news is making an impact when it comes to social shares.

Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail makes up a significant number of shares, but beyond that, there may be an interesting study to be conducted – What news we share and why?

I'm a big fan for a number of reasons, but the geekish aspect of shares and social media analytics is one of the key reasons I follow @RipplaNews.

Links: Sunny Hundal on Twitter | Rippla News on Twitter | Rippla News Website

Social Media – Is it built in to your crisis comms plan?

Crisis Control Group. Credit: Tlcmgmt, Wikimedia Commons 

Picture it, a disaster, a tragedy, or a serious faux-pas and your organisation is at the centre of it. You frantically dust-off your crisis comms plan and follow the outlined steps. You edit one of your template statements, rush to seek sign-off and then circulate it and publish it to your website.

How long does that take, 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, longer...?

The first place that news of the tragedy broke was on Twitter, if you’re lucky you found out about it five minutes after it happened. While you’re producing the statement and seeking sign-off, the story of the crisis is already developing on Twitter.

The first tweet went out within a minute of the incident, pictures, short videos and a hashtag start appearing after two or three minutes. Concerned people are using your Facebook page and Twitter account to ask questions and seek information.

Five minutes after the incident occurred, a journalist with a large following has picked up on one of the tweets and re-tweeted it. This is seen by a large number of people, including other high-profile journalists and politicians.

News of the tragedy has gone viral on Twitter, your Twitter account and Facebook page are being inundated with questions, what are you doing?

Some simple things you should be doing:

Internal comms

• It’s likely that your PR & Comms Manager will manage the crisis comms plan implementation. If your Social Media Editor/Manager/Ninja isn’t based within the PR & Comms team, ensure that s/he is in constant contact with your PR & Comms Manager

Monitor conversations

• Monitor related Twitter activity by using applications like TweetDeck or Hootsuite – Set up searches for the name of your organisation (If you don’t already have one running), the hashtag people are using, and variations of terms that people are likely to use when Tweeting about the tragedy
• Get on your Facebook page, find out what people are saying.
• If you have a presence on any other social media platforms, monitor them as well.
• If people are providing links in messages about the tragedy, click on them and find out what they link to.
• Google relevant terms – Google indexes new news stories and blog posts very quickly indeed, find out what people are saying

Say something (but not anything)

• Do not go radio silent, the conversation is already happening, and false rumours are beginning to take hold. Talk to the person managing the Crisis Comms Plan and form appropriate responses – do this quickly, and regularly. Where possible, and appropriate:
• Give out confirmed information
• Post appropriate updates on the situation
• Give out a helpline phone number
• If you have scheduled Tweets or Facebook updates about great new deals and upcoming promotions, delete them (They will be very, very poorly received in the middle of a crisis)

A solid crisis comms plan is important for dealing with any unexpected major incidents, but never forget that you are communicating with real people, trying to manage an incident where people may have been hurt or upset, trying to deal with messages from people that have real concerns, and an incident that many people may have a passionate and critical response to – Don’t forget to be human.

Does social media feature in your organisation’s crisis comms plan, and does it look anything like the points outlined above?