Wendy Harman

Are You Listening or Just Making Noise?

When a room full of social media users were asked about their listening experiences, one word emerged – overwhelmed.

“But real-time monitoring and getting a response out within an hour can be more important than the meeting you are supposed to attend,” said Chris Abraham, president and founding partner of Abraham & Harrison, a company that offers a menu of services to build a company’s online presence.

 He and others were discussing the importance of monitoring social media, or listening, as part of the NonProfit 2.0 Unconference recently.

Beth Kanter, author of “Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media” and co-author of “The Networked Nonprofit,” summarized core competencies around listening.

1)      Key words are king

2)      See the broad themes

3)      Use for workflow to engage externally and internally

4)      Develop information coping skills

One thing that Wendy Harman, social media manager for the American Red Cross, does is compile the 16 to 20 meatiest comments each day and sends widely as an email. She notes that this keeps everyone informed and shows the reach of social media.

The real question, Harman says, “Is what do we do with the content coming and how do we use it?”

“Misinformation – that’s where the listening comes in,” Harman adds. “I’m like a stalker. I need to be able to find people who are misinformed and reach out to them right away.”

The key is to provide them with the facts, Harman says.

Tools for listening are many and range from free to several hundred dollars a month. Tools used by the group include:

  • Technorati
  • Google Alerts
  • SM2
  • Twitter Search
  • Radian 6
  • Social Mention (it will search all of Facebook)
  • Addictomatic (creates a dashboard, but it’s busy)
  • How Sociable
  • Back Type (searches through blog posts)
  • Social Ping
  • Thrive/Small Act

Types of listening include, listening in real time, listening as research, listening for impact (ROI). That’s a lot of listening. But when the group was asked how much time they spent listening, most said, “Not enough.”

Beth recommended carving out 15 to 20 minutes each day or blocking an hour of your schedule on Friday.

If you want to learn more about how to be a good listener, Beth has a great presentation on the topic.

When Disaster Strikes, Are You Listening?

The American Red Cross listens in the social media space. It has teams of people ready to be deployed when disaster strikes.

Wendy Harman talks about listening at NonProfit 2.0.

Its Social Media Manager Wendy Harman has conducted training so that staff knows how to be a subject matter expert. She’s even developed a social media handbook (and has said we can use it!).

Most of her social media posts are intended to make the organization’s mission more known. “We like to have fun nerdiness with our posts,” she told the NonProfit 2.0 audience recently.

But, of course, there is a serious side to her job. And that’s getting the word out about disaster efforts. At 4:53 p.m. on Jan. 12, Wendy and the Red Cross “put into practice everything we did before.”

That included Facebook updates and interviewing a subject matter expert on Haiti in front of a world map with a flip cam so they could post the video interview.

At the start of a crisis, the Red Cross may have limited information. “Even if we don’t know anything,” Wendy said, “we acknowledge that something is going on.”

Ironically, Wendy said that on Jan. 11, she was feeling frustrated about social media. “We weren’t moving the needle on people taking action.”

All that changed after the earthquake struck. By 9:38 p.m. on Jan. 12 the Red Cross had set up text mobile giving through the State Department. By the next morning, 3 million people had made donations via their phones.

“We just had to tweet about it one time,” Wendy said. The White House also tweeted once about the mobile giving option.

“The rest was the American public,” Wendy said. “We were seeing an unprecedented mobile giving phenomenon.”

From then on it was about keeping the information churning and the public information push in the social world, she said.

In the aftermath, Wendy said the biggest lesson learned was that social media wasn’t “just fun and games anymore.”

“We really can do something here,” she said.

She learned about a group trapped under a supermarket. “They could hear the rescue workers, but the workers couldn’t hear them. But they were tweeting,” Wendy said.

Despite efforts, the group later perished.

What will change for the Red Cross, Wendy said, is that “we’re going to let the public come in and tell us where we need to mobilize. In the past we relied heavily on disaster teams.”

Wendy said in the future, for her, social media is going to be about tearing down the wall and “being really informed, really becoming  a facilitator.”

It’s her goal, and it’s a worthy one.