Wendy Harman Of The American Red Cross Talks About Creating An Online Social Media Movement

Following is an interview with the one and only “extremely left-handed Red Cross social media lady”, Wendy Harman. If you’re not familiar with Wendy, please read the interview Beth Kanter did with her in September of 2008.

Expected Vs. Actual Results

John: When you first started out, you expected certain results from social media. Then you took action and got actual results. How big was the gap between expected and actual results? What surprised you and why?

Wendy: “In the very beginning (late 2006), the goal was simply to “stop the internet people from saying bad stuff about us.” The results were that yes, a small handful of people were frustrated with the Red Cross for narrow issue-specific reasons, but the vast majority of the 400+ mentions of us every single day were passionately positive. This moment was actually the beginning of being able to have a social media strategy and was quite surprising to everyone.

People are more generous and more willing to engage than we gave them credit for being. Now, we’ve been able to figure out how to start building an online movement of people empowered by us and themselves to make a difference.”

Key Drivers For “Viral” Social Media

John: In your experience, what are the key drivers of the social media “viral” factor? Why do some social media campaigns go stale while others explode?

Wendy: “If I knew this I think I’d be a millionaire! I mean, who could have predicted that we’d know who Susan Boyle is at this time last week? I think you’ve got to touch, shock, and/or inspire, but figuring out what causes that effect is the secret sauce. For nonprofits or corporations, I think you’re far more likely to find success by making it easy for your supporters to create campaigns on your behalf. It’s really hard to be authentic and engaging when you’re chasing a “viral” campaign with gimmicky stuff.”

Slow and Steady Wins The Race

Wendy: “We stay focused on using social media tools to execute our mission – this is more of a slow and steady wins the race sort of approach that hopefully offers value to our social networking fans.

We try to be very action-oriented and to invite people to be a part of our social media endeavors. We also provide easily embeddable widgets, clips, banners, photos to make it super simple for our Red Crossers to create campaigns of their own.”

*Want to learn more? Then follow Wendy on Twitter.