Wow, Part 2 (VIDEO)
As many of you know, this year we took a little different approach to programming our annual Fall Conference. We turned a lion’s share of the decision-making to you–”the crowd.”
From start to finish, to say the results were spectacular would be something of an understatement. We received an unprecedented number of proposals for our October event in New Orleans–or as Minna Jung, the Network’s vice chair commented in an earlier post: “Wow“–and the numbers of you who voted on which sessions to put on the agenda was beyond anything we imagined. So, Wow, again!
Foundations Ask, How to Measure Social Media’s Contribution to Social Change?
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest funder of health programs in the U.S., recently hosted a roundtable on Social Media Measurement. Nearly a dozen foundations gathered with communication experts, evaluators and data analysts to share best practices and learn from one another. A version of the following post originally appeared on Knight Blog, the blog of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Guest Post: Mayur Patel
As social media tools have become ubiquitous, foundations have used them in a variety of ways to expand their networks, gather insights and build new relationships. As a result, there’s a growing interest in developing better ways to measure the impact of their online efforts.
At Knight, our approach to social media is based on using the tools to create opportunities for interaction and information exchange. As my colleagues Elizabeth Miller and Jon Sotsky recently wrote, we actively use social media to connect with our network, gather feedback, cultivate networks and promote our grantees and topics of interest. As a foundation, we’ve often used social media to disseminate publications and lessons learned, invite discussion on foundation topics, promote open contests and let people know about grant application deadlines. Our experience has demonstrated that social media tools have been powerful in pushing us to be more transparent. It’s opened up new channels for participation and feedback in our work.
WBEZ’s Birther Controversy
Guest Post: Mitch Hurst
In what’s been referred to by The New York Times as a “saucy” new marketing campaign, Chicago’s venerable NPR affiliate is pushing procreative sex. Advertisements plastered around the area, including on the sides of buses, are asking Chicagoans to “do it for the city” and “make babies today” in an effort to create a new generation of WBEZ listeners.
Like much of old media public radio knows it desperately needs to appeal to a new generation of potential listeners who have a smorgasbord of options that were unavailable to their parents and grandparent. If you believe WBEZ’s marketing department, the campaign is satire, designed to be provocative and grab attention. That it did, in a “what the hell were they thinking” sort of way.
