Is KONY2012 the most successful social media campaign of all time?

My timing was a bit off on this – reports have emerged of the head of Invisible Children and filmmaker behind KONY2012, Jason Russel, being detained by the police while having some sort of emotional breakdown. I have never questioned Russel’s motives and feel awful for him, the stress has clearly taken a terrible tole [...]

Read Full Post »

Starting at HopeLab

  Over the last month my life has gone from ambling along to whizzing by, a wonderful blur of new thing: people, work, projects. During this time I have however found myself struggling to carve out time to write and so a catch-up is in order. Two weeks ago I started work at HopeLab as [...]

Read Full Post »

Customer service or customer service theater?

Yesterday afternoon I listened as K exhibited patience and tact beyond what I would have been able to muster while dealing with a customer service nightmare with Blue Shield of California, her health insurance agency. She has probably spent an hour+ on the phone with them three times in the past week, trying to get [...]

Read Full Post »

Quora and the emerging interest graph

Quora is my newest favourite website. And it’s clear I’m not alone. After quietly building buzz through 2010 Quora has blow up, doubling in December and then doubling again in the first week of 2011. I’m not surprised: Quora, a question-and-answer platform, is tapping into a really important trend, the rise of the interest graph [...]

Read Full Post »

The new world of peer-funded projects

I have a confession to make. I’m a crowdfunding addict. Or as I think of these emerging platforms: peer-funding. For the first time projects can be funded by those who share the passion and vision of the creator. In other words, not the anonymous crowd, but your global peers getting together and saying “let’s make [...]

Read Full Post »

What has travel taught you?

  As part of my participation in the zooGooder fundraising challenge December 2-9, for which I’m supporting Global Lives Project (find out more), I wanted to share why I’m so passionate about travel and why I think Global Lives Project shares some of the important insights of travel to those who may not have the [...]

Read Full Post »

The amazing story of It Gets Better

It Gets Better is a grassroots campaign in America launched by sex columnist Dan Savage in response to a horrific spate of teenagers killing themselves after being victimized for being (or being perceived to be) gay. There were 5 suicides in September alone. After another one of these tragedies Savage wrote in his column that [...]

Read Full Post »

Community Managers: Are you a bridge or a wall?

“Community Manager” is the job title of the moment but beyond those with this written on their business cards the truth is that anyone doing social media work on behalf of an organization is doing community management work. You are the face of the organization, front-of-house, the link between internal organization and external community, at [...]

Read Full Post »

I’m a zooGooder!

A couple of weeks ago my friend Geoff Livingston called me up and asked me how I’d like to be part of a new group advising Razoo, the excellent nonprofit fundraising platform, on the development of a new personal fundraising tool. The group would involve fundraising, community-building and social media experts who would engage in [...]

Read Full Post »

Blog Action Day 2010

Artwork by Rose Fyson, made available by Oxfam International on a Creative Commons License. Yesterday was Blog Action Day, an inspiring example of the power of coordination and generosity on the internet. Blog Action Day was founded by three bloggers in 2007 and asks bloggers to write about a single topic on a specific day. [...]

Read Full Post »