Is There a “Right” Number of Social Media Sites for an Organization?

I just answered a question on LinkedIn that would be good for the blog as well. Should an organization be on 5 social media sites or 35?

I would prioritize. Choose 3-5 to really focus on and create a following on those sites. Then take time once a week to look at other sites you’ve placed your organization and see if you can make quick updates or find one new site a week to join. Be sure to keep a running tally of where your organization is listed. Put one hour a week toward the non-high priority social media sites and move on. But you want to be out there, because you never know which site is the next Facebook or LinkedIn. At Water For People, we focus most of our energy on blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. But, as a non-profit which is always seeking supporters, we definitely want to be listed wherever we can. One fun thing that you can do is create a page on your own web site that compiles multiple social media site contributions into one, such as this page – it’s half-Twitter and half-blog: http://www.waterforpeople.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Follow_to_Uganda . It’s amazing what you can do by leveraging various social media site’s existing technology.

Thoughts on this topic from others in the social media expertise?

The Picture is Never Crystal Clear

My yoga class was wrapping up today and the teacher said in her final words, “Remember that with any judgment you make, you only had part of the picture.” This struck me specifically because just earlier today I sat frustrated and sad at my desk because a woman in Florida lost her son to heatstroke while she was in a nail salon getting a manicure before her wedding which was planned later that day. The headlines read “Boy Dies After Being Left in Sweltering Car for More Than 2 Hours” and “Boy, 4, ‘boiled to death’ in 139F car after his mother went for manicure on her wedding day.” Try this for an experiment. Type in “Boy dies in car while mom at nail salon” into Google. At the time of writing, a majority of stories dramatized the story by making it appear that the mother had purposely left her child in the car. But upon reading almost every article, you’ll find within about four paragraphs that it is quite likely that the child snuck back into the car and hid behind the seats of the SUV after his mom dropped off other children at a relative’s house. But you would never know this from the headlines. A grieving mother loses her son and all the media can do is blame her on the front page and exonerate her on the inside page. How many people scan the front page and never click through to the story? Newspapers have always jumped for the opportunity to use a cliffhanger headline – but at least newspaper headlines are followed by the full story within a centimeter. The Internet can’t be so crass, without creating a lot of false rumors and needless victims.

Just like we never know the full story when we’re in a simple conversation that has the words “she said, he said” spoken throughout, we never know the full story about any topic. There’s always a piece we’re missing and judgment will always come at the risk of our compassion.