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Chapter 4

E (Engage): Tools to Win

Twitter allows you the chance to reach a wider audience than ever before. But unless you're Kanye, that vast audience might not take notice the minute you start tweeting. To get your writing noticed, you need to Engage.

At first, this can seem overwhelming. The key is in learning how to get your words in front of users who care. Connecting your Tweets with existing relevant information that people are already viewing on Twitter—or making your own Tweets the relevant information that others are looking for—should be your goal. The Twitter platform allows a variety of built-in functionalities to help you reach this aim. In this chapter, we'll look at exactly how to do so to best Engage on Twitter.

Built-in Functionality You Should Be Using

#Hashtags

For those new to Twitter, hashtags are a way to add further context to your Tweets. Simply put a hash symbol (#) in your Tweet, followed by a keyword, topic, or theme that each particular Tweet addresses. This will help identify your Tweet as part of a group of like-minded Tweets, and those following lists of particular hashtags will be able to find your Tweets more easily.

Hashtags are a fantastic way for organizations to build movements. Nike's Laura Adams, who leads Global Sustainable Business & Innovation Digital for the company, agrees. She believes that Nike's Better World Campaign on Twitter has been aided through hashtags. “Nike's used the #nikebetterworld hashtag to unite the conversation and energy around Nike Better World.” In effect, “the hashtag has helped us tie together the different facets of Better World around Nike's belief in and commitment to building a better world through sport and leveraging unlikely collaborations to unleash innovation. In the future, we see Twitter and hashtags playing an even bigger role in helping our consumers engage in Better World. They are a valuable way to generate awareness and energy at a mass scale.” Indeed, getting people behind your hashtag is key, and if done with great success, your hashtag can even “trend” on Twitter (multiple tweets with the same hashtag form trends, and very popular trends can get lots of exposure), getting in front of many more people than you might have first envisioned. In 2009, the thousands of attendees actively tweeting at the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford, England, were able to get their hashtag trending by doing just that:

John Carnell, CEO of Bullying UK, claims that his favorite endeavor to date on Twitter has been making the hashtag #charitytuesday an active part of the Twitter sphere. He says, “I spotted the tag one Tuesday morning floating past my stream and thought—what a great way to allow the general public to say thanks or recommend charities. I then used the power of our network to get the word out about it; for the first three weeks we had a trending topic and now people from all over the world use it to promote organizations they care about. I think it's had a huge impact on charities' use of Twitter, and I know of a number of non-profit organizations that have joined Twitter just to take part in #charitytuesday.”

Hashtags are a fantastic way to join an existing conversation already targeted to a topic of interest—or to create your own. Although I spent years creating hashtags that never caught on (read #nyquildreams and #akenyanmosquitojustdiedonmyface), in March of 2011 I was happy to lead a social innovation workshop at South by Southwest that resulted in a very relevant hashtag: #Twitter4Good.

Events are a hugely popular time for hashtag creation—and if your organization is participating in a conference (or is unable to attend but wishes you were), using the correct hashtag will get your thoughts in front of people who care about your issue. Samasource, an organization that seeks to bring jobs to the world's poorest, is one organization that uses hashtags effectively. Samasource's motto is “Give Work,” and this social enterprise works hard to bring dignified, computer-based work to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty. From refugees in Kenya to women in rural Pakistan, the populations served use Samasource to find life-changing work opportunities via the Internet. In parallel, Samasource enables socially responsible companies, small businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs in the United States to contribute to economic development by buying services from their workforce at fair prices. At Samasource they are constantly working to spread the message about their work to find new donors and supporters, and conferences are one venue in which to do so. With Twitter, they've been able to tap into a way to make the speaking events they attend have even more impact—by reaching those at home as well.

Leila Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource, explained,

We attend dozens of conferences and speaking engagements each year on subjects like poverty, outsourcing, and development. Twitter enables us to have many members of our organization interacting with people in an audience instead of just our main speaker. It moves a topic like Crowdsourcing for Good from just a question-and-answer format panel discussion to an ongoing event that people can participate in by using [a hashtag]. While one member of our organization is answering questions on the panel, several more can be using Twitter to spread the answers and to respond to follow up questions online.

Hashtags are certainly not just for time-sensitive events, however; there are many hashtags that run every day, year in and year out, like #charitytuesday and #followfriday (a hashtag encouraging you to find and follow new users every Friday). Following these hashtags to see what people are saying about your cause on any given day keeps you informed of recent events and key players in the field on Twitter. When you contribute Tweets to that particular stream by using that hashtag, you establish yourself as a voice on the topic as well. Third-party Twitter clients like Hootsuite can also create ready-made streams of hashtags so that you can constantly follow an increasingly long list of hashtags relevant to your cause.

It's important to always be relevant when using your hashtags. Some Twitter users get into the habit of tacking on hashtags even when a particular Tweet is not related; this is surely one of the easiest ways to get individuals who would otherwise be interested in your cause to deem you a spammer, ignore your Tweets, or even unfollow you. Additionally, don't stick any and every hashtag you know of that might be relevant to a Tweet you are proud of.

Organizations on Twitter could learn a thing or two from hashtag extraordinaire Carrie Isaac, founder of ColoradoBargains.com, whose mission is to help Colorado families save money on the things they have to buy. She says, “I see a lot of people tweeting something they want lots of people to see, so they stick two or three or four (or more—shudder) hashtags on the Tweet to increase its visibility.”

As Isaac explains, there are a few key problems with this practice. “One, the content of the Tweet is lost in the clutter of the hashtags. You can't see the Tweet because of the hashtags. Two, people immediately recognize that you used those hashtags in order to gain visibility from people that may not be following you.”

Given the purpose of the hashtag, Isaac emphasizes how overuse of hashtags is spam at it worst. “You want to be relevant in the hashtags that you use, and make sure you understand the context of those hashtags so you're not mistaken as spamming. If you don't participate in a hashtag and aren't part of that hashtag community, you may not understand its purpose, audience, or subject matter—and if you use it for a purpose that's outside the scope of that hashtag community you may [gain an unfortunate] reputation in that community for tweeting irrelevant or even offensive content.”

Newbie users are especially adept at using too many hashtags.

When @sammyikua and I first met at Tumaini Children's Home in Kenya many years ago, I learned right away he was ace at technology. After he had spent just a few hours a week on the orphanage computer during his preteens, he was able to fix any computer woe I could come up with. These days, Twitter is just one more tool this connected teen uses to talk with the world about global citizenship (his favorite topic, as a trilingual Kenyan finishing high school in the United States). But his overeagerness can sometimes be a bad thing, as in this Tweet:

Although I applauded his use of my new hashtag #Twitter4Good, I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought his otherwise valuable article link got lost in the glare of too many hashtags. As Sammy's guardian, I had no qualms setting his Tweet straight:

Aside from overtagging, you should also avoid using overly general words as hashtags. Using the incredibly broad hashtags #world and #international (as @sammyikua did above) won't get your Tweets in front of interested parties, and it will make you look like a spammer, a newbie, or both. The best hashtags are specific phrases that, ideally, others are also using.

The country of Argentina is wild for Twitter, and one of the nation's top newspapers even has an online section devoted to Twitter news (see http://140.perfil.com/). Argentina in particular has set itself apart on the platform by the sheer number of uncannily active politicians. The powerful minister of foreign relations for the country, Héctor Timerman, is even known as “Twitterman.” As such, it was no surprise that Argentines began using hashtags wildly in the lead-up to the 2011 Argentine presidential elections. Amazingly, some politicians (and banners throughout the city) showed that even extremely long hashtags like #EchemosLuzSobreMacri could work if the users were passionate.

The message is clear: to create or join a conversation, use carefully chosen hashtags prolifically, but only when relevant. After all, your hashtag can reach farther than you expected, and can even spark a movement. @alya1989262 is a twenty-one-year-old Egyptian student who was the first to send a Tweet with the #Jan25 hashtag during the January 2011 Egyptian Revolution. During one of the most important moments in her country's recent history, she coined a Twitter hashtag that symbolized the movement—online and off.

See a list of some great hashtags to follow at http://twitter4good.com/resources/hashtags/

Use Lists

Every Twitter user should be using lists. They are a great way to find relevant accounts and information and position yourself well in front of those interested in your cause. Lists aren't static directories of Twitter handles, but rather living Twitter streams from individuals you choose. Not only can you use lists to organize the people you follow into relevant groups, but you can also follow the relevant Tweets of people on lists—even if you aren't following those individuals. Find lists on the top right-hand side of your timeline, and use them with abandon. Here are a few different ways to make the best use of lists:

Search and Follow Lists

Searching for lists is a fantastic way to find individuals who are consistently tweeting about themes you are also interested in. Christie George is the director of New Media Ventures, the first national network of early stage investors in start-ups focused on building progressive change. She is constantly searching for relevant information to help her investors, and lists are one way to do this. “I've found lists most helpful when I need to get caught up on a topic quickly—especially one that may only be of momentary importance. I find someone whose voice I appreciate, whose network seems interesting, and can check out a relevant list without drowning out the friends and colleagues that I'd like to hear from more regularly.”

As opposed to hashtags, lists allow you to follow all the Tweets of an individual within your interest graph—not just the Tweets they have denoted with relevant hashtags. In the long run, this is an important step in helping you develop relationships with these users. Although at first it may seem unnecessary to read the personal Tweets of a potential organizational supporter or donor, it is important to remember that learning about people's personal lives and connecting with them on these themes is the best way to build the relationships that ultimately lead to professional collaboration. George explains, “I like how institutions have used lists as a way of promoting the personal voices of their staff (for example, @neworganizing). Even when I know that individuals are speaking for themselves (and not on behalf of their organizations), it really helps to get a sense of the people that power the mission.”

Create Your Own Lists

If you can't find a list that exactly targets your demographic or interest group, the best thing to do is to make your own. People on Twitter love when others place them on lists, and when they find out that you've placed them on your list, they are likely to check out your account, the list in question, and the other users involved.

Creating your own lists is another way to make better or more targeted lists than already exist. For example, let's say you are a New York City–based foundation aiming to meet and connect with other foundations doing similar work. Although you have already searched for (and found) a great list of like-minded foundations all over the world, you realize that the list in question is simply too broad for you; you want to be able to find executives in philanthropy in your community. Solve the problem by simply creating your own list of NYC-based foundations to help narrow down the players.

When creating a list, make sure you're not the only person on it. From the get-go, you want to add key players in the field, both large and small—remembering that large or high-profile organizations may increase the lists' credibility, but smaller organizations may be more likely to actively engage.

The National Park Foundation is one example of an organization using lists on a daily basis, and to aid in times of crisis. Chartered by Congress in 1967, the National Park Foundation is the official charity of America's national parks and was established to strengthen the connection between the American people and their parks to aid in preservation. When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico occurred in 2010, the National Park Foundation focused on steering volunteers and donors to make an immediate impact. Trevor Martin, the manager of new media, described how the Foundation had created lists on Twitter prior to the spill to maintain relationships with many national parks units and provide relevant National Park Foundation information on grants, programs, and partnerships. In the midst of disaster, Martin says, “These lists helped the foundation stay on top of information relevant to the parks and give minute-by-minute details about what was going on in those national parks most impacted by the Gulf oil spill.”

Private Versus Public Lists

Although most of the list suggestions so far have to do with making sure others see the lists you are making and taking part in, private lists are also an important tool for causes to use. Organizations need to stay top of mind for relevant journalists and public relations representatives, and a great way to do so is to create private lists where you follow the individuals you eventually want to pitch something to. No one else needs to see these lists, and you can keep these private, viewable only by you. With a private list like this, you can regularly keep track of certain individuals and send them an @reply (or even a direct message, if they are following you) when they send out a relevant Tweet. Building a relationship over Twitter is a great stepping-stone to further professional efforts down the line; we'll talk more about this in the next chapter.

Use @reply …

Don't tweet in a bubble. Not only is it boring, but it won't get your organization where you need to be. Engaging is all about bringing others into the conversation when they otherwise might not have found their own way in. One easy way to do this is to mention others in your Tweets via an @reply. People watch who @replies them, and using @replies smartly can put you on their radar. Like the hashtag, the @reply is a user-generated feature created when frequent Twitter users found a need for it. The key with the @reply is to make sure you're using it, and to make sure you're using it well.

For many organizations, the @reply is the perfect way to engage in real-time customer service. Tara Roth McConaghy, the former COO of GOOD, Inc., and the senior advisor on the Pepsi Refresh Project, says that Twitter's power for the Pepsi Refresh Project was about more than its ability to bring awareness to the campaign. It also allowed for real-time support for participants. She says, “Not only was Twitter an effective tool for campaigners to promote their particular cause, but it also provided a corporate communications outlet for companies like Pepsi and GOOD to answer technical questions about how to submit projects—establishing a one-to-one, dynamic relationship with customers and consumers, while also affording other Twitter followers the benefit of that information.”

If you are on the side of the individual trying to engage with potential sponsors and supporters, mentioning them via @reply is a great way to stay top of mind. Following an important meeting, think of sending an @reply as a way to remind a potential collaborator of your key message. As an example, Global Citizen Year once had a promising meeting with the SunPower Foundation about how the foundation might best help Global Citizen Year fellows find global apprenticeships in the solar space. To firm up the connection, and formalize their ask for support, Global Citizen Year sent out a Tweet after the meeting as a quick summary:

The Tweet served two purposes. Not only did it tell @globalcitizenyr followers what Global Citizen Year was up to, but it also reminded the SunPower Foundation about the meeting and the importance it held for Global Citizen Year.

Indeed, the public nature of an @reply is important, and there's a reason people send @replies when they could send direct messages.

The @reply helps create accountability. Because anyone can see the @replies directed toward you, one could argue that a potential collaborator is more likely to respond to an @reply than an email. It's an intuitive way to ask something in a public way, and it was actually created organically by Twitter users.

In 2007—before I knew how to use @replies correctly—I tweeted from Kenya hoping to catch the attention of the race directors of the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy Safaricom Marathon, where I was taking a bunch of teens from the orphanage where I lived on behalf of my non-profit organization.

Without my using an @reply mentioning Safaricom's Twitter handle (if they even had one in 2007), the chances of Safaricom finding the Tweet was low. Years later, I've changed my approach. In 2010, I gave a talk at a conference where Procter & Gamble, maker of Gain laundry detergent, was offering free robes to speakers. Annoyed that I forgot to pick up my (free! freshly laundered!) robe, I tweeted about my anguish to some other speakers, putting @alliworthington, the cofounder of Blissdom Conferences, on the Tweet. Not only did she reply to my @reply and send me a robe, but she also (miraculously) still became my friend.

… But Avoid @reply Spam

As always, the important thing about the @reply is to use it responsibly—which is to say, make sure that what you are writing is relevant to the entity you are tagging. The latter half of 2010 saw the rise of Paper.li, an application that “organizes links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy-to-read newspaper-style format”—and with it the (sad) rise of irrelevant @replies. It was frustrating to see individuals I otherwise think of as quality Twitter users using my username (@ClaireD) irrelevantly in these updates, and in late 2010 the situation had gotten so out of hand that many began a concerted effort to subscribe out of paper.li @reply spam. It was a wonderful morning when I woke up and saw the following Tweet from @biz recommending just how to do so using an original opt-out account called @newscrier:

Within minutes, my @reply stream was much cleaner.

Retweet!

One of the easiest ways to engage on Twitter is to retweet. People love seeing their words repeated and passed on, and many Twitter users take great pride in tracking the number of retweets a given Tweet earned and the “distance” the Tweet traveled. (Think of it as a bit like a six degrees of separation game, inspired by Twitter.)

It's important not to become too overzealous in retweeting, however. If one follower retweets every Tweet your organization writes, their recommendation for you holds less weight. Take this to the extreme and you'll find many an account set up by a spammer whose sole purpose is to automatically retweet highly followed accounts.

With retweets, you also want to make sure that you don't fall into the trap of becoming a lazy Twitter user. Especially on a busy day or week, it can be very tempting to forget about writing your own Tweets and to simply retweet what others are saying. This is particularly true when you are good at Engaging and you find yourself constantly exposed to high-quality content via lists and hashtags you follow. As an example, I manage Twitter's @hope140 account, Twitter's account that focuses on being a force for good. There are clearly many examples in the Twittersphere of Twitter's use in humanitarian or prosocial causes, and I constantly receive great tales of non-profits using Twitter via lists I follow, hashtags, or @replies. As a result, I am often tempted to retweet a bit too often. After all, how important is it to simply rewrite a Tweet that you saw somewhere else in your own words, instead of just retweeting it? It turns out it can be quite important, as too many retweets in your timeline tell your followers that you aren't developing your own quality content. You can have too much of a good thing. A timeline full to the brim with retweets just may send the message that you can't come up with anything good enough on your own to say.

Ask Questions

Asking questions is one of the best ways to Engage with Twitter. Indeed, one of the first things I ask organizations who want to improve their use of Twitter is whether they are asking enough questions of their followers. Creating a weekly question related to your mission is a great way to instantly up engagement. When in doubt, go for questions that offer people the chance to say their opinion, and not to answer with a “right” or “wrong” answer. When it's a personal question, everyone can offer an answer via an @reply.

See a list of some of the best questions to ask your Twitter followers at http://twitter4good.com/resources/best-questions/

Promote Products on Twitter

Finally, no discussion of tools is complete without a nod to the paid and pro bono products Twitter offers to advertise your organization or cause. There are a range of paid promoted products on Twitter that fit every brand—for-profit or non-profit.

For non-profits interested in pro bono advertising, we also offer several options. Pro-Bono Promoted Tweets for Good and Pro-Bono Crisis Tweets are application-based programs that take on select numbers of (registered 501[c][3]) non-profits each year. As the name suggests, Pro-Bono Crisis Tweets are devoted to non-profit organizations responding in times of crisis. Although the wait list is long for the pro bono programs, the opportunity is a great (free) one for causes; find more information at www.Hope140.org.

Although the specific programs will change over time, the concept remains—promoted products offer ways for organizations to better reach interested parties on the Twitter platform and to benefit from innovative, creative ideas that answer people's current needs. In the aftermath of the catastrophic 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami, for example, some paid advertisers took up this challenge. Realizing they could best serve the public by nixing their current campaign and instead providing useful tsunami-related information, regardless of its connection to their brand, they changed up their advertising on the fly. For example, BuzzFeed, a technology website, started running this promoted Tweet:

Whether coming from a paid client (like @BuzzFeed) or a pro bono client (like @HawaiiRedCross), these types of promoted Tweets did exactly what good advertising should do—addressed people's real-time needs:

Let's now explore more deeply just how to use these tools to stand out.

Connect Others with Resources

As many of the built-in engagement tools on Twitter reveal, the real beauty of Twitter lies in the fact that it is not a one-to-one service, but rather a one-to-many service—allowing you to both follow and learn from all the many individuals who do not personally follow you. When people ask me “What's the first thing I should do when I sign up for Twitter?” I say “Help someone.” It's true. There is no better way to get noticed than to directly meet someone else's need. I have seen few individuals on Twitter who do this better than Mark Horvath.

Mark is the founder of InvisiblePeople.tv, but he prefers to brand himself as Invisible People's Chief Evangelistic Officer, Do-Gooder, and Loudmouth. Every day, Horvath works hard to connect homeless people with resources. Horvath used to be homeless himself, and he intimately understands the population. Specifically, he knows the nature of Internet use among homeless people. As he explained when he came to talk with us at Twitter headquarters, homeless populations in the United States spend immense amounts of time on computers in public libraries.

On his blog, Horvath described—in Tweets—how Twitter helped one family over the Christmas holidays. Horvath had met a woman at a shelter who was living in her van with her nine-year-old son. When the city towed the van, the family had lost everything. Horvath had stepped in to check them into a hotel and take them grocery shopping. When the mother said she desperately needed a change of clothes—and another women at the shelter chimed in—Horvath broadcast the needs via his Twitter account, @hardlynormal.

Almost instantly, Pastor Matthew Barnett of the Los Angeles Dream Center sent Horvath the following direct message via Twitter:

Horvath described what happened next:

Because the only clothes this mother and child had were on their backs, I didn't feel we could wait another day. I searched the GPS on my phone and the closest store was Walmart. I tweeted that I was headed there. Soon, Pastor Matthew called me and asked me to pick out a nice toy for the boy and suggested a Nintendo DS. The Los Angeles Dream Center is the church that helped me off the streets, and Matthew Barnett has been caring for homeless people for over a decade. He knows people without housing cannot carry lots of stuff, so a portable video game is a perfect gift.

As Barnett and Horvath helped the family, Horvath began taking video clips, and then live-streaming the action on UStream, ultimately putting the shots together to create a YouTube video. The encouraging Tweets he received were overwhelming.

Horvath's story shows how seeking help on Twitter is a great way to find much-needed resources. As we'll explore in the next chapter, the idea of reaching out to those who may be able to help you on Twitter is a great one. Twitter allows you access to people outside of your social graph, and non-profit organizations can take advantage of this to reach the influencers they need to engage.

Twitter also offers the unique ability to do personalized fundraising. The best fundraising comes through personal connections, and Twitter allows organizations to benefit from a broadened reach of personal asks.

Luke Renner and his family administer the day-to-day operations for The Caribbean Institute of Media Technologies, The Learning Village, and HANDS Across Haiti. When Renner came to visit Twitter headquarters in San Francisco in 2010, he told a powerful story of direct fundraising on Twitter. Because Renner is known in his Haitian community for his charitable efforts, one day a man knocked on his front door, asking for help to pay his daughter's school fees, which he himself couldn't afford. Renner turned to Twitter, and within hours was able to raise the necessary funds to send the young woman to school.

Connecting individuals with resources also works on Twitter on a mass scale, and broad humanitarian crises and emergency situations have shown how useful Twitter can be. The tragic earthquake in Haiti showed many examples of this.

Growing up in the ghettos of Baltimore, Lynette Camara thought she understood the meaning of being poor until her uncle sent her pictures of an orphanage he was working at in Haiti. Since seeing those images, Camara has made it her mission to help others to break free of poverty. She is the creator and founder of USAforHaiti and an advisor to Kledev, an organization that empowers economic development in Haiti. Although she wasn't on the ground when the earthquake happened, she was able to use the tools at her disposal far away from the disaster area to help. Her efforts also show how connecting resources through data mining is a growing field in humanitarian aid work. When she learned from her uncle that the landlines were down but the Internet was working, she quickly got in touch with @carelpedre, a radio personality in Haiti who was able to get messages out using his equipment, and @ramhaiti (Richard Morse), a hotel owner and musician who also had access to computer equipment and was posting crucial information. Camara created a database that matched information about those who were alive with those looking for them. She explains,

If the database got a match by name, age, location, or other identifying information, I would try to further verify that information. When I was sure there was a match, I would send out a Tweet to announce it. Then, once verified (for as much as it was possible to verify information coming out of Haiti in those days), I would post the information I received directly to Twitter, the feed of which was running on my website.

It became apparent that not only were there people searching for information on missing loved ones or posting that they were alive and well in Haiti, but there were many postings from people still in need of rescuing. Many of them were text messages sent to Twitter so that they would show up online. I saw on CNN that the Germans had a satellite trained on Haiti in order to map the changes in topography due to the earthquake.

Camara got access to their satellite so she could communicate with the people online claiming to be trapped or hungry to map their GPS coordinates into the satellite and get a high resolution photo of the area to study in order to find out whether there was anything that might prevent access, such as roads blocked by debris or cracks in the ground. In turn, she relayed the information to authorities on the ground. Ultimately, she says, “I collected as much information as possible from all around the Internet, ran it through my database to try and match information from survivors with posts from people looking for survivors, and fed it through one website, www.usaforhaiti.org, via a Twitter feed.”

Gretchen Steidle Wallace, the founder and CEO of Global Grassroots, is another individual who used the power of Twitter to make connections during the earthquake. While living and working at the site of a collapsed hotel, she helped family members overseas and rescue workers on the ground to connect during relief efforts through her handle, @consciouschange.

In the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, similar relief efforts occurred.

In the wake of the quake and tsunamis, without power and regular access to the Internet, Twitter via mobile was more active than ever. Jeannie Stamberger, associate director of Carnegie Mellon University's Disaster Management Initiative (DMI), was quoted saying that more than 1,200 Tweets per minute were coming from Tokyo within an hour after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Stamberger said, “The amount of data flowing over social media during this crisis has been overwhelming.” (see http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/society/2011/winter/siliconvalley-dmi.shtml).

In one case, the NBC Today Show's Ann Curry helped find one lost American in Japan. When Twitter user Megan Walsh asked Ann Curry (via Tweet) to find her sister, @anncurry tweeted back that she would try to help.

A day later, on Monday, March 14, Curry and her crew traveled to a middle school in the town of Minamisanriku, where the missing American Canon Purdy used to teach and where she was on the day of the earthquake. Finding her alive and well, they immediately put Purdy in touch with her family in the United States—who had been waiting for seventy-two hours for word from her.

Tweets as Data: The Present and Future of Crisis Mapping

The use of Twitter via mobile and SMS in disaster relief is not just about sending and receiving information, but also about tracking and plotting those reports so that people have accurate information, and so that relief organizations can respond. Crisis maps are tools that plot reports coming from a variety of sources (SMS, RSS, Tweets, and the like)—and allow for action. Noel Dickover, cofounder of Crisis Commons, explains, “Twitter provides a valuable tool for crisis mappers early on in a disaster because it allows local participants to quickly communicate both the overall state of the disaster and details of a specific event (e.g., ‘My son is trapped in this building…’). This dynamic allows the larger crowd to find and aggregate these Tweets through various crisis mapping platforms.”

Ushahidi is one of the most prominent of the crisis mapping organizations at work today. In Kiswahili, ushahidi means “to bear witness,” and the organization got its start when serving as an important way for individuals on the ground to document post-election violence during the highly disputed Kenyan presidential elections in late 2007. Thanks to Ushahidi's crisis mapping of the violent demonstrations in the slums, the outside world got a grasp of the severity of the situation. Patrick Meier, director of crisis mapping at Ushahidi and a Ph.D. fellow at Stanford University's Program on Liberation Technologies, says simply: “Crisis mapping is about creating live maps of the world around us.” These maps democratize information, increase transparency, and lower the barriers for individuals to share their stories, ultimately allowing humanitarian aid organizations to provide relief based on the geo-coordinates of a report. In Meier's eyes, crisis maps like the one used in Japan (see Figure 4.1) “are to humanitarian crises what X-rays are to hospital ERs.” As a result, many organizations throughout the world—Twitter included—are eager to work with crisis mappers like Ushahidi in disaster situations.

The strategy of formally collecting information gained from many sources (including Tweets) and then connecting those in need of resources with those who can help is one that we've worked on at Twitter headquarters. In October of 2010, nine months after Haiti's devastating earthquake, Haiti was plagued by another crisis: a cholera outbreak. International aid organizations worked hard to provide support to victims as the disease spread from the outskirts into the capital city. Building off of Twitter's use in the Haiti earthquake, the American Red Cross worked with us at Twitter to onboard a new account, @kwawouj, that sent updates in Haitian Creole directing individuals to the resources they needed. Working with mobile carriers in Haiti, Voila, one of Haiti's largest mobile providers, generously pushed out an SMS message in Haitian Creole to all Voila's mobile users, encouraging them to follow @kwawouj's cholera update Tweets via SMS. Crisis mappers then stepped in. With the cholera outbreak, HealthMap, an openly available public health intelligence system similar to Ushahidi, provided the element shown in Figure 4.2.

The limits of such resource mapping do not stop with crisis management, however, and Ushahidi and other crisis mapping organizations have been used in increasing ways to create awareness through data mining and data plotting. Following up on the 2009 success of turning the Twitter platform red on World AIDS Day, in 2010 the product partnering program (RED) envisioned another way to make a large-scale impact. For World AIDS Day in 2010, (RED) engaged Ushahidi to develop a unique world map. As Chrysi Philalithes, director of digital and strategy marketing at (RED) explains, the map proved the epitome of engagement. Each time someone tweeted using #turnred on World AIDS Day, the message mapped itself onto a data visualizer of the world. Each action served to turn a different time zone on the map red (see Figure 4.3).

In the wake of the massive earthquake and tsunamis in Japan, other new initiatives sprang up. Carnegie Mellon University's Ian Lane, an assistant research professor in Silicon Valley, helped to map critical Tweets. Lane told CMU.edu, “With the help of volunteers, within a few hours we had developed an architecture for the live monitoring of Twitter as well as a basic system to automatically identify the most critical Tweets from the huge volume that were being generated.” The CMU group then built a “Twitter parsing” system in Japanese to extract the location and person's name from each Tweet. After verifying the data, they entered it into Google Person Finder, allowing people all over the world to check in and see whether friends and family in Japan were safe. Lane said that the model “bridges the gap between unstructured social media and structured data.” He continued, “Just by tweeting a message stating that they are fine and well, this information will become available to all their friends and family around the world via Google Person Finder.” (See http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/society/2011/winter/siliconvalley-dmi.shtml.)

Efforts like these are examples of the innovative ways that people use Twitter to engage in situations where information is more important than ever. Although crisis-mapping tools that collate data received via SMS and plot it on interactive maps provide an important step in connecting resources with those who need them, they also bring up concerns. When Jon Gosier, director of product for the SwiftRiver open source platform at Ushahidi, came into Twitter headquarters, I asked him what he thought of the criticism that it is difficult to prove the veracity of the reports when using crisis mapping. Jon candidly explained,

There's two ways I think about this question. First is from a technical level, the integrity of the information itself, and proving validity. That's exceedingly difficult for machines to do because it requires an understanding of things beyond the information itself. Context about an event, language, intent, motive … all these things play into verifying information. If someone sends a message that says, “My house is on fire,” without additional context there is no way to verify [that] what was said is either true or false.

The other way I think about this is from the crowd-sourcing perspective. Platforms like Ushahidi and Twitter lower the bar for everyone to communicate freely. It's in the participation of the many that they are most effective. So in some ways having unvalidated information is the point. Making communication accessible to all is first, keeping participation high is second … if you have those first two, I think the process of prioritizing who to listen to (validated versus unvalidated members of the crowd) becomes a good problem to have. Because you'll only be concerned about malicious content if there's an overabundance of participation to begin with.

It's true. If the goal is open information, then “unvalidated” information just may be the whole point. Ideally, the future will see further integration of Twitter emergency messages, mobile carrier announcements, and crisis mapping.

Top Questions About the “Engage” Step