Wendy Harman is a senor social media blogger at the American Red Cross and a speaker at the Era of Conversation (October 4, 2007 in Washington).She graciously agreed to do a Buzz Bin interview and talk about what’s new at the American Red Cross, including her new blog Red Cross Chat. This is the first time anyone’s learned about Red Cross Chat, so I think you’ll be interested! Wendy also talks in depth about the Red Cross’s Twitter efforts.

BB: Tell us about Red Cross Chat. What is it?

WH: Well, it’s kind of a scoop (if big nonprofits launching blogs is still considered a scoop)! We, the American Red Cross, have created a blog. Hello world! I’m posting to it regularly now but we haven’t “launched� it or otherwise told anyone about it besides you. Hopefully, it will become a space that welcomes honesty and transparency as well as community conversation.

The Red Cross is really made up of ordinary citizens trying to help out their neighbors, so I think there’s a lot of room for connections to be made. Hopefully, we will do more listening than lecturing (although you might still get a hefty dose of preparedness tips). Of course, it will also be handy to be able to talk to our stakeholders directly instead of through media gatekeepers.

Part of my job here is to monitor mentions of the Red Cross in blogs and on social networking sites. Hundreds of people choose to write about us every day, which indicates to me that there’s widespread passion for our mission. It’s amazing that so many people are taking time out of their day to post about their experience with the Red Cross.

I see lots of blood donation stories, lots of people encouraging their readers to donate time, blood, and money during disasters, lots of CPR training tales, and yes, even some people calling us out on inconsistencies in service. I do my best to connect with all of these people to acknowledge their contributions and to figure out any inconsistencies. I’d love to use Red Cross Chat to highlight some of these bloggers – they tell the story of the organization far better than I can from my cube in Washington, DC.

BB: I noticed the Red Cross has twitter blogs now. What will you do with those?

WH: This project is still in the incubator and hasn’t been tested yet – it’s the brainchild of your friend and American Red Cross Communicator Ike Pigott.

The idea is that the Red Cross Twitter channel (http://twitter.com/RedCross) will push information out and the Safe and Well Twitter channel (http://twitter.com/safeandwell) will pull information in. This technology can be accessed online and via mobile devices, so the likelihood that the public can get to it in times of disaster is increased.

For example, the information push through Red Cross Twitter might work if a family on an interstate evacuation route texts “FOLLOW REDCROSS� to 40404, signing themselves up for Twitter to find out where the nearest open shelters are.

The information pull through the Safe and Well Twitter channel is a direct complement to the existing Safe and Well website (https://disastersafe.redcross.org/). In the wake of a disaster, we see lots of people looking for loved ones in a bunch of different online spots. This is confusing and inefficient. After Hurricane Katrina, the Red Cross and several other organizations combined their resources and expertise to create the Safe and Well (https://disastersafe.redcross.org/) website, a place for evacuees to register themselves and a search tool for loved ones seeking information. We hope to use the Safe and Well Twitter channel to make it easier for people to register themselves on this site, even if they’re in areas where many lines of communication are down.

BB: The Red Cross is very pro blogging. How are you enabling your volunteers?

WH: The Red Cross is pro blogging. I think blogging and bloggers help achieve organizational transparency, and that’s something we strive for. I’ve certainly learned a lot about the nuances of Red Cross services through reading individual accounts of actual experiences. These stories appeal to me as a human being, but they’re also valuable to the organization because we’re able to pinpoint the beginning stages of trends. We can find out daily which initiatives are working in the field and which aren’t.

When I started last December I noticed that not many employees or volunteers mention the Red Cross in their online communications, even when it’s a large part of their lives. I think there is/was some fear. “Am I allowed to discuss my work?� “How do I protect the privacy of clients?� With this in mind, we thought about how to empower them to tell their stories without crossing any corporate boundaries. We came up with the Online Communications Guidelines. I hope these guidelines, along with the accompanying glossary of Web 2.0 terms, will help all 1 million plus volunteers determine how and whether to join in the fun.

BB: What do you enjoy most about social media?

WH: The offline benefits. I am an internet addict, to be sure, but the greatest value I’ve gotten out of social media is the ease of making connections with people I admire, old friends, new friends, colleagues, and people I never would have met had we not found some common ground or interest online. It’s just made the process of keeping up with friends and connecting with new people too easy to ignore.

This might be cheating, but I also truly enjoy the realness it encourages. I love the blurring of personal and professional personas, I love the democratization of media, I love the many gray areas it’s created in the world of intellectual property, I love its messiness, and I love the sheer gargantuan possibility for collective knowledge sharing. This is an exciting time. Plus, bloggers tend to be snarky and clever and funny and creative and I am easily amused by them.

In my capacity as a Red Crosser, I love being able to reach out and connect with others who also care about this gigantic humanitarian effort. It’s fun to see what they are passionate about, what irks them, and how much they get out of both volunteering and receiving Red Cross services.

BB: Have you had any negative issues yet from your readers / users of Red Cross social media?

WH: Honestly, I can’t think of a single one right now. We’re just getting started, though. As the old saying goes, you can’t please em all! I hope as we build a bigger presence in social media that we can take all the good and all the bad and help create a more effective organization over time.

As another old saying goes, the opposite of passion is indifference, not anger. I can think of many instances where I’ve read negative commentary on individual blogs or forums, but a passion about the Red Cross underlies that negativity. I try to acknowledge their frustration and put them in touch with someone who can help ease the situation. In pretty much every instance this philosophy has worked.

Here’s one example:

Andrew Ferguson

Naked Conversations: A Case Study of the American Red Cross

April 23, 2007

As you know, I took an American Red Cross class on Saturday that I felt was less then satisfactory. […] Someone there had found my blog post and brought it to his attention. My phone number is right there on the front page, so it’s easy to contact me (which is the point). I wrote about my thoughts on the class last night at 10:30 pm and now I was actually talking to real person who was trying to help me out. That is why this is so awesome. The American Red Cross cares about me as a person and they’re willing to go the extra kilometer make sure that I’m happy. […] In the long term, this gives the American Red Cross HUGE points. I can’t tell you highly I think of them now. I’d even venture to say that because of his call, I am now significantly more likely to take another class from the American Red Cross then I was before. And all it took was a seven minute phone call.

BB: What do you think of social networks like Facebook, etc?

WH: I like Facebook more each day. It’s a people feed. It took me about a month of daily use before I “got� how RSS would change my life, it took a little less to catch on to Facebook. Of course the groups and the causes have been big boosters for lots of charities – not necessarily in monetary donations yet, but in awareness and relationship building.

My previous work experience is in the music industry, so I’m intimately familiar with the power that MySpace had in giving independent artists an audience. Without getting too deep into that issue, I feel lucky to have seen how musicians leveraged free viral tools to gain audiences in an otherwise bottlenecked media landscape. Now, everyone is seeing this same value applies to them as well. Facebook is only making that leveraging easier to achieve.

Over 500 groups on Facebook have identified themselves as having something to do with the Red Cross. When the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, 82 new Facebook groups were set up overnight to discuss the tragedy, raise money, and connect. Lots of those 82 also mentioned the Red Cross. The speed of that astounds me. You might even say it overwhelms me – I’m not sure what to do with this level of participation yet, but it feels really powerful.