A social media project I’ve been working on this month went live today, and I’m proud to finally be able to share the final product. Second Chance is a non-profit organization based out of San Diego, CA. The organization focuses on breaking cycles of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, substance abuse and incarceration through social entrepreneurship. Over the past 15 years they’ve developed an innovative support system for people in need that has an unprecedented track record for producing positive results – largely due to the unique approach they take to solving tough problems. The founder, Scott H Silverman was named a CNN hero of the week this year for his work in the space.
Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Scott, who gave me the opportunity to visit the facility and see for myself what the organization does and how it transforms people. A few months ago I spent a day sitting in on one of their classes and the experience was eye-opening and profoundly affecting. When you see the system working for yourself first hand, you get the message loud and clear. Not only is what they do great for local communities, it’s great for society overall. When they contacted me a few weeks ago about getting them into social media, I was happy to join on. Here’s a quick video that we launched the project with that gives you a snapshot of what Second Chance is all about:
Designing A Social Media Presence For Second Chance
Scott’s a forward thinking, energetic guy and he recognized early that getting in to social media makes a lot of sense for his organization. From a cost perspective, social media for a non-profit is a no brainer, but Second Chance was also generating a lot of buzz after Scott was awarded the CNN hero award and released his new book. For a non profit they had a huge amount of content distributed around the web. Before I came along, they were already into email marketing and facebook as well as posting YouTube videos and getting a ton of positive press – they just needed a way to pull it all together, brand it consistently and create a place that they owned where the community could interact and share content, resources and stories with one another. We knew when we first talked about the project that we wanted consistent branding that matched their 2010 annual report across Facebook, Twitter and a customized blog, and the project evolved from there. The final product, I think, looks pretty slick and ties each social media outlet to all the others in a clear and coherent way. Here are some screenshots of what we did. Each screenshot links to a Second Chance site, so please explore and feel free to give feedback. We’re all excited about the new direction and we hope the Second Chance community is too….
Custom WordPress Blog Design For Second Chance
Custom Facebook Welcome Page
Consistent Branding Across Facebook Tabs
Custom Twitter Branding
Today there’s a big push to make Internet Access a basic human right. In the US, the majority of us take freedom of speech (online and offline) for granted and we tune out the debates on heavy censorship that is commonplace in other countries. If you’re not aware of the kind of control and manipulation that’s happening in other places in the world, these two video interviews (back to back in the same video) will help bring you up to speed quickly. The first interview is with Rebecca MacKinnon, who is a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. Before leaving television to become a blogger and co-founder of Global Voices Online. She is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center and lives in Hong Kong. The second interview is with Evgeny Morozov, who is currently a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York. Previously, he was Director of New Media at the Prague-based NGO Transitions Online (TOL) and a columnist for the Russian newspaper Akzia (2003-2008).
Here’s a summary of the content that’s covered in the interviews. Enjoy.
- Internal Web Censorship In China & The Great Firewall of China
- Blogging In China
- Chinese Internet Police
- How Humor Slips Through The Cracks of Censorship
- Russian Internet Censorship
- Russian New Media and Government Manipulation
- In Depth on Hidden Censorship in Russia
- Economic Crisis’ Impact on China and Russia
- The Global Network Initiative
- Moving to Other Blogging Platforms, How Informed Citizens Are
- Humor can lead to Meaningful Action
- Web Questions
- Knowing Fake Commenters
- The Use of Anonymizers
- Web Use and the Secret Service on Web in Russia
- Penalty for Companies Not Censoring Content
- Mobile Trends
- Data Integration, Search Capacity In China
Couldn’t make the Gov 2.0 summit or Expo this year? No sweat. O’Reilly has posted 76 videos from the event on YouTube, and they’re free as free can be. How much do you love the social web?! Seriously.
In these videos you’ll find brilliant people discussing remarkable new possibilities and business models for reshaping our political culture, our economy and our government. The emerging themes across all of the Gov 2.0 topics this year focus around principles of participation, collaboration, transparency, and efficiency to address the challenges facing our country and the world. I hope the video channel embedded below will wet your appetite and encourage you to open up to new ideas and new ways of thinking about how government works and how we can make it better. If you really want to dive in with both feet first (and why wouldn’t you?), head over to gov2summit.com and drink from the firehose.
We’ve got a talent problem. We’ve got too many brilliant marketers getting us to love stuff. Somehow they’ve gotten us to buy into this formula: bigger, better, shinier, more expensive stuff = self-esteem. Being the self-esteem seeking creatures that we are, we consume gratefully. The issue is that it’s not doing us much good.
In Small Is The New Big, Seth Godin points out exactly why the side effects of great branding is a problem that needs fixing, and why we should worry that (as he puts it) “the unintended consequences of excellent branding…is one of the great tragedies of [the marketing] profession”. He says -
I think when traditional marketers talk about “brand”, self-esteem value is what they mean. A true brand is something where the self esteem value far exceeds the utility. It might be Heinz ketchup or a Rolex watch or a Marlboro cigarette, but in each case there’s a truly emotional connection between the brand and the user….It might be Timberland boots downtown, or Prada bags uptown. Both are ridiculously overpriced for the utility they deliver, but it’s the story we tell ourselves that matters, the label, the image, the peace of mind.
The problem, of course, is that the values and the messages that are selling us the promise of peace of mind are also leading us astray, and there’s no way to market our way out of the problem. Or is there?
I’ve been following the #IranElection Twitter Stream ever since the protests started. It’s not unlike trying to drink from a fire hose. Social media hubs all over the web have lit up like fireworks and the citizen journalism is amazing. And the Iranians are not alone. People all over the globe are coming to their aid and amplifying the already deafening roar of the protest. Thousands of photos have been posted to Flickr, hundreds of blog posts and new blogs have gone up and literally hundreds of thousands of status posts have hit Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed from citizens reporting on events happening on the ground in Iran and all over the world long before popular media. CNN can’t even keep up.
The Iranian government have done their best to silence the virtual protest – they shut down popular sites like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook…and the crowd found work arounds, organized themselves quickly, got the word out and the cracks in the government’s dams broke and the flood continued. Millions of mobile phones and computers have replaced guns as the weapon of the revolution…and the crowd is winning. Read More
