Author: Lee Aase

Haiti Earthquake Relief Made Personal

Haiti Earthquake Relief Appeal

The news about the Haiti earthquake is overwhelming. The devastation is unfathomable.

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In a disaster of this magnitude, we all want to help. But sometimes we can be come paralyzed, for a couple of basic reasons:

  1. We feel that with the greatness of the need, our contribution can’t make much of a difference, or
  2. We hear reports of Internet fundraising scams that use the disaster to defraud the generous.

While social media can be used to perpetrate the con jobs, their real power is to enable those who care to give meaningfully and with confidence.

You can give to charities endorsed by people you know, or by people the people you know, know.

I know that last sentence is really awkward, but take a minute to think about it. And while you’re thinking, here’s a story that will help drive it home.

I met Tom Vanderwell (@tvanderwell) last year via Twitter, as described here. Having met on Twitter on a Sunday night, we had coffee together in his home town, which is nearly 500 miles from mine, the following Wednesday. And when I returned to Grand Rapids, MI in August for my granddaughter Evelyn’s birthday, I went to Tom’s house to interview him via Flip video for this post on our Sharing Mayo Clinic blog.

While there, I met Tom’s youngest children, Abby and Isaac, whom he and his wife had adopted from Haiti. Cheryl and their older daughter were on a mission trip in Haiti at the time I visited him, which is why I needed to meet Tom at his home: he had to be there with his adopted kids. I also learned that Tom was involved as a member of the board of the Haitian orphanage, God’s Littlest Angels.

So when I got the message pasted at the top of this post from Tom yesterday via Facebook, I took notice. It brought the disaster one step closer to me, because I knew someone actively working to provide relief. And I knew that the projects he would be supporting would be well-run, economical and wouldn’t involve a lot of administrative overhead. In short, I knew that whatever I gave would be well spent.

As you’ll note, Tom also asked us to invite friends to help, whether it’s 10 people giving $100 or 100 giving $10.

That’s where you come in.

I’m not going to suggest what you should give. You need to decide that on your own.

But I do want to assure you that whatever you send for God’s Littlest Angels will be used well, to meet real needs.

This shows something of the power of social media, in that through Twitter Tom and I created a personal relationship that led to meeting in real life, and also to maintaining that relationship through Facebook. And you should check out this post Tom did on another blog, about how he has been using social media in the aftermath of the earthquake, and how through Twitter he got the director of the orphanage in touch with @AnnCurry of NBC, which led to the Today story embedded above.

So now I’m inviting you to join me in a “Six Degrees of Trust” experiment.

  1. I know and trust Tom
  2. You know me (if you’ve been reading my blog regularly) and hopefully trust my judgment.
  3. You have your own circle of friends on Facebook, and followers on Twitter, who know and trust you.
  4. Your friends likewise have friends and followers.
  5. …who have friends and followers…
  6. …who have friends and followers…

So whereas Tom had some suggested steps for us who are his friends, here’s what I’m asking you:

  1. Give what you can to help God’s Littlest Angels. I have embedded the contribution widget at the bottom of this post.
  2. Post the link of this post to your Facebook wall, or send it directly to selected friends on Facebook.
  3. Send a Tweet about this effort. Here’s some suggested text you could copy and paste: Six Degrees of Trust: People you know helping orphans in #haiti #godslittlestangels http://bit.ly/4Fmtq1

I talked with Tom briefly this evening via Skype. He said the orphanage is currently over capacity, with 160 kids. Given the deaths resulting from this earthquake, it’s likely there will be dozens more children needing housing and help. I hope you’ll take a few moments now to help provide that help.

Employee Communications at Mayo Clinic

An interview featuring one of my Mayo Clinic colleagues was posted recently on Ragan.com. Linda Donlin was interviewed as part of the health care social media summit we hosted with Ragan in Arizona. Here’s the video:

I thought you’d enjoy hearing from one of my colleagues at Mayo whose job is different from mine, but who is actively embracing social media tools for communication with our employees.

Here’s a post I did at the time about the “In the Loop” publication, including an example.

This emphasizes that social media tools are powerful, and can be adapted to your communication needs. They also help you go beyond “audiences” to “communities” by enabling those you’re reaching to provide feedback to you and share with others.

RAQ: Do Seniors use Social Media?

Here’s a recently asked question from Sturle Monstad (@sturlemo), from Bergen, Norway:

Lee,

Thanks for collecting such a wealth of info on your SMUG site. I am using the resources in my work with health promotion for older adults. I have a contract with Lions Club in Norway on a programme they are setting up a web site for them. I am now trying to include social media for marketing and community building.

They are a bit skeptical, but well see how things work out. We see that seniors are getting more active on Facebook, and I think the interaction may be positive for many. Have you written anything about social media/seniors?

Answer:

First, thanks for helping to put the “Global” in SMUG!

As I say in Thesis 23, almost everybody uses social media today, whether they know it or not. You point out correctly that Facebook is growing rapidly among those over age 55, having increased by more than 900 percent in 2009.

I also can tell you that on our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel, almost 30 percent of video views are from people age 55 or older.

As these tools are becoming ever easier to use, the growth of social media will continue. I believe women over 55, for example, are the fastest-growing demographic in Facebook.

It all comes down to whether the content or subject matter is worthwhile and interesting.

My dad turns 79 on Saturday. He’s on Facebook, too, because it’s a way to see video and photos of his great-granddaughter.

Social platforms, from blogs to Facebook to YouTube, make it easier for anyone to share information that others will find interesting.

What do you think? What other statistics or arguments about senior citizens and social media can you offer to Sturle? Do you have any personal examples or case studies to share?

What Brown did for me

This is an example of how treating customers right (or at least correcting errors) not only avoids a United Breaks Guitars fiasco: it can actually lead to positive social media buzz.

As I reported in October, Meredith Gould is a great humanitarian, having bailed me out by recovering the Flip video camera I left on the podium at a speaking engagement in Philadelphia. She sent it to me via UPS, and said she would let me know the cost when it showed up on her credit card statement.

I was more than a little surprised, however, when she sent me a direct message tweet in early December, with the bad news:

Although I was shocked at the bill, I told her I would of course reimburse her, but asked if she could send me a scan of the statement. As I tweeted:

I just want to use it as a graphic for a fun post: “What did Brown do to you?“

I figured that if it was going to cost me nearly $80, I should at least get a blog post out of it…especially since I had forgotten my iPod in Florida in mid-November and the FedEx bill for that shipping was $17.97. But then Meredith said:

In subsequent consecutive tweets, I told her:

  • “If you wouldn’t mind calling UPS about it (and telling them the FedEx charge in a similar situation was $18) it wld be cool”
  • “And depending how it works out, we’d either get a smaller bill or a better story to tell on my blog ;-)”
  • “Might as well have some fun with it…like I do when I run out of gas.”
  • “Between leaving a Flip and an iPod behind, and running out of gas, maybe I should stop and think a bit.”

(By the way, here’s the post I did about my out of gas experience.)

Meredith’s response:

Two days later, I got this happy email:

Lessons:

  1. If you think a bill is outrageous, don’t just pay it. Contest it. It may be a mistake.
  2. If your business made a mistake, fix it, and you’ll not only avoid the bad word-of-mouth, but will instead get kudos. Fixing a mistake can be better for you marketing-wise than not having made the mistake in the first place. If the UPS bill had been correct originally, I wouldn’t have been the subject of my conversations, much less a blog post.
  3. Don’t make mistakes on purpose so you can benefit from fixing them. If you’re systematically overcharging and hoping people won’t notice, it will catch up with you.
  4. Hire more customer service people like Tiffany, and fewer like Ms. Irlweg.
  5. Don’t mess with @MeredithGould!

Proving Moore’s Law

I’m fascinated by hard drives.

I have been ever since the mid ’80s, when my brother-in-law, Lane, and I both had Apple IIe computers with 128K floppy disks, and he blew me away by getting a 5 megabyte hard drive to store data for his farm bookkeeping program.

The cost: $1,800. And it seemed unfathomable he would ever fill it.

Moore’s Law (from a paper Intel co-founder Gordon Moore published in 1965) suggests that computing power (or data storage) that can be purchased for a given price doubles every 18 months.

In this post, based on my recently acquired custom of Black Friday hard drive shopping, I want to prove Moore’s Law for you.

I usually get up early on the Friday after Thanksgiving to take advantage of the electronics sales, and one place I typically go is Staples. Two years ago, I bought a 500 gigabyte hard drive there for about $70 (after rebate.) That was 100,o00 times the storage Lane bought in 1986 for about $3,700 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Last year, I bought a 600 gigabyte drive, again for about $70. Especially with my use of the Flip video camera, my “need” for storage has increased.

This year, I bought a terabyte drive (1,000 gigabytes) for $70. So in essence I got 200,000 times the storage Lane bought 23 years ago, for less than 2 percent of the price.

Granted, this was a door-buster sale. But even at full price for one of these drives, it’s mind-boggling.

And actually, I didn’t just get one drive; I bought two. In addition to the terabyte drive, I got another 500 GB drive that is powered by the USB connection. That makes it extremely lightweight, so I can carry it with me at all times in my laptop bag. As you can see in the photo below, it’s not much bigger than a classic iPod.

500 GB Hard Drive with iPod

And just to put it in further perspective, here are the two drives I bought on Black Friday, with a total of 1.5 terabytes for $140:

375 Hours of Flip HD Video Storage

But here’s the main takeaway/action point from this post, and how it applies to you:

Mark your calendar now for 11/26/2010 at 6 a.m. If Moore’s Law holds (as it has for 44 years), you should be able to get a 1.5 terabyte hard drive at Staples for about $70.

With HD video consuming about 4 GB per hour, you can never have too much hard drive space.