The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently released the results of a survey of their subscribers’ use of social media in 2009.

They found that 88% of those responding were currently participating in some form of social media; more than half of those had been doing so for less than a year; most were participating via “general social networking” (e.g. Facebook) or blogs / microblogs (e.g. Wordpress, Blogger, Twitter.) The most popular tools used among respondents were Facebook (86%) Twitter (57%) YouTube (37%) and Blogs (48%).

All this use of new communication tools is great, but since so many organizations are new at this, they run the risk of doing a lot of communicating without saying anything. Every communication, even those limited to 140 characters, is an opportunity to tell your story. If you’re an organization doing great work, the stories you have to tell are probably some of your most valuable assets.

John P. Kotter, bestselling author, Harvard Business School professor and thought leader in the field of leadership and change wrote, “Those in leadership positions who fail to grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies and for themselves.”

In the spirit of learning and collaboration (not picking on anyone), I have taken the liberty of writing alternate Tweets for a few organizations by way of example:

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How we interact with our customers has changed a great deal over the last century and a half and is morphing even more rapidly than ever before.

Once upon a time, if your customers had an issue with your products or services, they would hop on their horse and gallop to the local store and speak to someone face to face. This very personal interaction would encourage the business to work closely with the customer to resolve the issue or face the possibility of that person telling the whole town how bad the store is.

Then along came the telephone and businesses had to establish call centers to stay connected to their patrons. The customers now had a choice - visit a physical location for help or just pick up the phone from the comfort of their own home. While this new era of options was a positive development overall, it gave some companies the option to hide from their customers behind a menu system and switchboard. They no longer had to look a customer in the eye and tell them that they couldn’t help them with their issue. However, the customer still had the option to tell their friends about their bad experience so the risk to the business of not assisting their customers was still relatively high. The only difference is that those conversations would happen one-to-one in person or during a phone chat so the risk of a lot of people finding out about poor service was relatively low.

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Imagine someone you love has been taken by a foreign, hostile government.  Where do you turn?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the families of Laura Ling and Euna Lee went online.  There they found a committed, vocal and galvanized group of people who shared their goal of bringing their loved ones home from captivity in North Korea.  When you love someone, the why’s and how’s fade pretty quick.  Your overriding concern is simply getting them home safe. 

I speak from experience: Laura is my friend’s little sister.

There was an initial round of shocked emails as friends heard the news.  We know Laura as a level-headed, committed journalist, a woman who cared a great deal about exposing injustice and doing what she could to make the world a better place.

The women’s plight was aided a great deal by Laura’s older sister, Lisa Ling, a reporter for National Geographic and Oprah. Lisa is savvy as they come, and grasped quickly how the media could help raise awareness. The families hit the talk show and news circuit, pleading for their loved ones’ release.

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I love food and I love social media. So I have been very taken by the Kogi success story.

For anyone not living in Los Angeles, California, not following social media or not interested in food, a little background is necessary.

Kogi started as a taco truck, a very familiar sight on LA streets and nothing to write home about.  The first interesting twist comes in the food: Kogi takes Mexican staples (tacos, quesadillas, etc.) and “koreanizes” them. Trust me, the result is exciting, different and delicious. The second, and to us social media marketers, more important twist is that Kogi built a cult following using a blog and Twitter.

The blog gets about 21,000 monthly unique visitors (per Quantcast, nothing to sneeze at for what is essentially a very local blog) and @kogibbq has almost 22,000 followers! Twitter was used as a tool to let (hungry) followers know where the taco truck would be on any given day or time and tweets reportedly draw crowds of 300 to 800.   And that’s for a restaurant-on-wheels that launched as recently as November 20, 2008. Read the rest of this entry »