The Power Of A Tweet
Two nights ago, thinking about the devastation in Haiti, I saw a tweet come in from @knako, Kevin Nakao, VP of Mobile and Business Search for Whitepages.com.
I had been tweeting and posting onto Facebook and texting and generally trying to get the word out about how to help. Because during these times of disaster, money is the most important — and immediate need — of relief organizations. So, I tweeted a simple request:
And, that was the beginning of a few tweets and dms that generated a link on WhitePages.com that night to donate to the Red Cross via text messaging.
Now some may poo-poo the link and think “so, what? Who looks at.” But, you’d be surprised. Links can generate anyway from .1%-1.5% conversions. On a site like Whitepages.com that receives 20.8 million site visitors a month, according to Quantcast, even .1% can be significant. For the Red Cross it could mean another $208,000. Imagine if 1.5% respond.
That’s a powerful tweet.
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[...] goodwill and energy of Gen Y. Check out Mai Strategies’ Blog for a great example of the “the power of a tweet” in light of the recent crisis in Haiti. In reading about Yelp’s new augmented reality iPhone [...]
Hi Anne, I’ve been so busy that I wouldn’t have taken the time to do this unless you had called me out on Twitter about this. Thus, your power of Twitter premise is true and with folks watching it carries more weight than 1-1 communications
Most importantly, its all for the good, and thanks for prompting me to act.
@knakao
Anne,
Your post really resonated with me. If you don’t mind, I may borrow the tale for a guest blog that I was invited to post later this week.
The day after the Haiti earthquake I instructed our social media marketing director to drop everything and simply spend the morning on Twitter trying to help connect resources to people who want to help.
Later that day she sent me this note:
“On Wednesday we were #31 in the list of top 100 tweets on Haiti” according to Topsy.com.
Very satisfying indeed.
Deron Triff
CEO, Changents.com
Deron, you welcome to share the tale. You might want to also take a look at an initiative my colleagues and I have just launched http://causeshift.com. We want to address some of the issues relating to how causes and disasters are thought about, responded to and solved. There is so much learning, so much good thought that can be gleaned from this disaster in Haiti. We didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to focus the discussion and see where it goes. You might consider sharing a post about Changents there.