I think of social media measurement as a continuum of measures. Consider using one or more of these in your measurement strategy.

Activity: This measure is all about what YOU do. Do track your activities and benchmark them against results but don’t stop there. Many agencies tend to focus their reports on activities they completed for a client, but they should not be considered results measurement.

Attention. This measure is all about reach or “opportunities to see.” They say that any publicity is good publicity, but as we all know in this 24/7 news-hungry world not ALL attention is good attention. The easiest thing to measure in social media is attention. You can see how many visits your page has, how many were unique and how many were repeat or new visitors. Attention looks at volume, number of friends and reach.

Awareness. This measure is all about engagement with you. It means that people are starting to become aware that you exist in social channels. It doesn’t mean they will take any action beyond this, or that there will be any appreciable business results.  Awareness measures include Likes, mentions, share of voice, referrals and % of followers engaged.

Attitudes. This measure is all about conversation about you. You can measure online sentiment to get a crude idea of where you stand with the community over time, mostly positive, mostly negative and mostly neutral. However, sentiment doesn’t give a full view and can be significantly skewed if you use automated sentiment tools. You can look also at customer satisfaction surveys and cross tab with their involvement with social media sources, loyalty over time, and repeat visits to get an idea of attitudes. The gold standard is conducting a relationships survey.

Actions. This measure is all about what they actually do (rather than what they say the will do). You can look at measurement of results in several categories including financial measures (ROI, et), customer changes, processes impacted and innovation realized through outreach activities. See the chart below for some ideas.

You can read more about this approach in the Slideshare presentation Measure Social Media Results, which we prepared for the 2013 Digital Summit in Atlanta, Ga.

The post The Five As of Social Media Measurement appeared first on Zoetica Media.

1. Don’t Be Afraid to Reach Out
   When I moved to Houston in 2008, I knew almost no one. There were four people who went out of their way to welcome me, including Marc Nathan, Sandra Fernandez, Ed Schipul and Jennifer Texada. One afternoon, over a lunch at the California Pizza Kitchen, Jennifer and I decided to start a chapter of the Social Media Breakfast in Houston (#SMBHOU).  We reached out to the people I mentioned above, along with a few others we knew might be interested. Not everyone is willing to put in the work to build a community, but almost everyone is willing to help out. You just have to ask.
2. Choose a Real Life Location People Know and Love
   In May 2009, we had our first meeting at the then-famous (JR Cohen) Coffee Groundz in midtown.  Abut 20 people attended that first meeting, and these people made up this nascent community that has grown to over 1,800 on Facebook and 700 email subscribers, which translates to an attendance of about 100 people every month. One of our biggest challenges for this online/offline community was finding a place to meet. We quickly outgrew Coffee Groundz (now closed) and moved to Te House of Tea, and finally landed at Canopy Houston.  Always, we found our new location through a community member. Make sure you let your community lead you, and make sure you take the community from merely online to the real world. This crossover builds a strong foundation.

3. Patio at Coffee Groundz	Te House of Tea	Canopy Houston

    

4. Don’t Try to Own the Community
   The most important part of the community, and what I believe keeps it valuable and interesting for people, is that it really has nothing to do with one person or company. While me and my company Zoetica have been dedicated to keeping #SMBHOU afloat, it wouldn’t be possible without the efforts of each and every person in the community. Without them it would be a failure. As it stands, #SMBHOU is one of the most vibrant places in Houston to learn about and connect with successful influencers about how to use social media.

5. Meeting in the drive-thru a Coffee Groundz

    

6. Thank the People Along the Way
   So many people have helped along the way, too many to name here, but notably are Marie Angell, Brian Cohen, Melissa Darragh, Aimee Woodall and Michele Price – as well as those people who helped me early on and have continued to support the effort (See “Don’t be Afraid to Reach Out”). The bottom line is to think about ways to highlight these people in the community and thank them for their help.

   Brian, Kami, Sandra	MaryBeth, Aimee	Marie

    

7. Be Sure to Deliver Quality Content Every Time
   One of the things we did early on is to deliver the kind of content that was interesting to the advanced social media practitioner. We made sure not to feature anything that we wouldn’t be interested in ourselves. We also didn’t parade the same people up over and over again or feature people just because they were part of the “in” crowd. We have had very few repeat speakers, and when we have, we have made sure it is on a different subject in which the person is an expert. We also don’t usually have standard PowerPoint driven presentations either, instead we have conversations. It has been a winning strategy. I have included a sample of our most recent event below. In this one we talked about how Bloggers and Brands can work together. Thanks to one of the speakers, Fred Goodall from Mocha Dad, we have a Google Hangout on Air recording of this event. See, community at work! You can read more about the program on the event page.

Notice I never said, “Be a really popular and well-known figure in your community.” Again, I knew exactly FOUR people when I moved to Houston.

Bloggers and Brands: Finding the Perfect Pairing

Read the hashtag stream for this event, and all of the other events run by #SMBHOU here (filter by date and look at May 10, 2013)

The post Five Lessons From Building an Online and Offline Community appeared first on Zoetica Media.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is hosting a convening of leaders from 11 foundations, as well as experts in evaluation, social media, and communications to develop measures for evaluating the impact of social media on the outcomes that are most important to foundations. These outcomes go beyond how many followers or friends an organization amasses and go to more important social media measurement like the impact on organizational mission and social change.

In an effort to open up this discussion to a wider community we are working with RWJF staff Debra Joy Perez(@djoyperez), assistant vice president, Research and Evaluation, and Tina Kauh (@tinakauh), program officer, Research and Evaluation to moderate a Twitter chat on Thursday, April 18, 3-4 p.m. EDT. You can follow with me at Kami Huyse (@kamichat).

It will be a great opportunity for a much wider group to set the stage for a discussion about moving beyond the obvious measures and the challenges to tying social media activities to measureable outcomes in social change. I hope those of you interested in subject will drop in to lend your expertise. This chat is an opportunity to engage with other professionals around current practices, assumptions, and opportunities to measure the impact of social media on philanthropic outcomes. While it has a foundation focus, it can also apply to social movements and other nonprofit endeavors.

We will be asking the following questions, among others (feel free to add your own questions in the comments section below)

• How do u know if social media strengthens perceptions of an organization as a valuable information source? #SM_RE
• How do u know if social media multiplies an organization’s impact thru broader dissemination? #SM_RE
• How do u know if the public knows, advocates or acts MORE because of social media efforts? #SM_RE
• How do u know if an organization’s network is growing stronger via social media? #SM_RE

Social Media Measurement Twitter Chat: Evaluating Impact of Social Media on Foundation Outcomes

Details:

• When: Thursday, April 18, 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. EDT
• Where: Log into Twitter and search the hashtag #SM_RE
• Please RSVP on Eventbrite to confirm your attendance

Register Here: http://smm042013.eventbrite.com/

You can register for the event on Eventbrite (not required) and it will add it to your calendar so you don’t forget!

The post Social Media Measurement Twitter Chat Focuses on Philanthropic Outcomes appeared first on Zoetica Media.

Screen Capture from Neville Hobson’s cool WordpPress Plugin Page

One of the best things about the WordPress community is that they have developed thousands of awesome plugins that can help to customize your blog. Here are some really great WordPress plugins that we often recommend for clients. We have listed some of the features we like, as well as the drawbacks of some of them.

We would love to hear your favorites and why you like them in the comments section below.

Blog Backup

Backup Buddy, http://pluginbuddy.com/purchase/backupbuddy/
This plug in allows you to back up your blog on a regular basis, thus making sure that you don’t lose everything if a WordPress update goes wrong or if you get hacked. It is not free, but it is only $75/year for up to two sites. You can also use it to transfer a site to a new host.

Spam Killer

Akismet, http://akismet.com/
A free plugin which identifies and blocks comment and trackback spam on blogs with integration to various blogging systems. This is a free, must-have plugin to reduce spam.

RSS Management

Feedblitz, http://www.feedblitz.com

We used to recommend Feedburner as a  replacement RSS service, but with Google’s diminished support of the service in October 2012, we now recommend Feedblitz for those who want more control over their feed and a good delivery service. With Feedblitz you can even send your blog via email to your subscribers that chose to get it that way. Feedblitz charges for email subscribers based on volume, starting at about $1.50 per month and going up from there. RSS subscribers are free.

Also see JetPack below

SEO Helpers

All in One SEO, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all‐in‐one‐seo‐pack/ This is a very easy‐to‐use plug‐in to allow you to have basic SEO standards right out of the box so you can easily add title tags to posts and other keywords. This plug‐in is free.

Scribe SEO, (http://scribeseo.com/) costs anywhere from $17‐$48/month and helps give you phrase and word suggestions to drive search engine traffic.

Inbound Writer, http://www.inboundwriter.com/ The basic plan is free and allows you to customize four documents, with topic research and content optimization. You can have it for up to 15 documents for $40 a month. It is the priciest of the three, and I have used the basic plan. You can reserve the research of some of the most important posts that month.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet‐another‐related‐posts‐plugin/
This adds a list of posts at the end of each article that are related. This keeps people on your site longer and digging deeper into the content. It is great for virility.

Share Buttons

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter‐facebook‐google‐plusone‐share/
At minimum you need: Facebook Share, Google +1, Twitter, and LinkedIn InShare buttons. In addition, you can use either the ShareThis or AddThis plug‐in, but you should provide the boxes, as mentioned, though the plug‐in above has all of the basics.  Also see JetPack below.

Also see JetPack below

Commenting Systems

LiveFyre, http://www.livefyre.com/:

Livefyre is a popular plug‐in that replaces static comment sections with dynamic, real‐time conversations. It integrates well with Twitter and facebook and allows easy sharing on these networks. It is free up to 20 million views a month. we like the promise of LiveFyre to help spread the word virally

Disqus, http://disqus.com: Disqus is a popular commenting system that puts the focus on ease of use. It has the ability to connect with Facebook and Twitter, but is not as aggressive as LiveFyre. It has an elegant way to reply and moderate from email that is not yet available in LiveFyre. Comments continue to synch with the native WordPress client, making it easier to switch later. It is also a free plug‐in.

Also see JetPack below

Mobile Compatibility

WPTouch Pro, http://www.bravenewcode.com/store/plugins/wptouch‐pro/ a WordPress plug‐in, is not free (a license is $39), but it makes stunning mobile versions of websites. We recommend this as many people are using mobile smartphones and now tablets to consume content.

JetPack, http://jetpack.me. This free plugin actually does a lot more than just making your blog mobile compatible, it also can replace your commenting system and handle email subscriptions, among other things. You can activate as many parts of the system as you want and omit the ones you don’t need. It can be used as pretty complete solution and replace some of the suggestions above. The only things that concern me right now about using it is that you can’t transfer subscribers from an established blog unless it was hosted on WordPress.org, and I am really not sure how you would transfer OUT of their subscription system, should the need ever arise. Otherwise, it looks like a pretty great plugin, and I learned about it from Neville Hobson, who is using parts of it on his own blog.

The post Some of the Best WordPress Plugins to Optimize Your Blog appeared first on Zoetica Media.

In public relations, workflow is everything. Here are seven (plus a sneaky eight at the end) tools that I use on a daily basis that could help you to stay organized and even do more than would otherwise be possible.

One caveat, these tools are largely for people using Gmail. If you use another email platform, like Outlook, you can check out these add ons. If you are on a Mac, you should also check out the tools my friend Michael Schechter uses.

Also, two of the recommended tools, Asana and Diigo, are platform agnostic.

Go Professional with Gmail

Google Apps

If you are using GMail you should consider paying the $50 per year, per user and getting Google Apps. This will allow your calendar to work with your branded email seemlessly and has some other benefits, like letting your team share calendars and scheduling, much like Outlooks allows in team environments, but for much less than an Outlook server. You can read the Small Business Guide to Google Apps to get you started.

Write that Name

Write That Name is a French startup which updates your Google Contacts. I used to spend 15 or more minutes a week doing what Write That Name does automagically. This saves me 13 hours a year at least. There is a free version to update 20 contacts a month, I pay $23 per year to get unlimited service and have some control over the account. I also love that the CEO Phillipe Laval is so responsive on Twitter @writethatname

Getting Organized

ActiveInbox

The basic ActiveInbox package is free, but I pay the $24.95 per year because it is just that good.  It is a Gmail addon that can be use in Chrome and Firefox. It lets you organize your tasks and project folders in Gmail to and do simple CRM. You can also use it to get a zero inbox and use the GTD system, for those who are into it. I am not even close to completely utilizing the power of this app yet.

Asana

Asana is one of the most talked about startups of last year with an all-star team, including co-founder of Facebook Dustin Moskovitz. This is great if you are working on tasks with a team, or even on your own. You can set up workspaces and then projects inside of those workspaces and finally add tasks to those projects. You can assign different people to each task and get email reminders of what is due and when. Everyone on the project can assign tasks. You can read an in-depth review on Lifehacker here. Asana is free for teams up to 30 members and then pricing starts at $100/month and goes up from there.

Engagement and Outreach

Rapportive for Gmail and Google Apps

Rapportive connects your email interactions with your social networks. When an email comes in, it allows you to follow that person on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, request to connect on LinkedIn and numerous other channels. Everything that the email connects with shows up in the right sidebar. I have used this to connect with new clients, prospects and just new friends. It is invaluable to give me the info I need about each new (and sometimes old) contact.

ToutApp

ToutApp advertises itself as a great app for sales, and I can see how it would be very useful for that. But it is also a really useful application for PR work. You can keep track of email pitches through its easy to use interface, and you can put together templates to use for all kinds of correspondence. Because it is a one to one email sent directly from my email address, and because each email can be customized, it doesn’t feel spammy. Also, it ensures all the formatting stays the same. I have used it to pitch bloggers, organize speakers for events and many other uses. You can read some of the may ways you can use Tout on its help site. There is a free and paid version. The free version allows five emails per day and allows three templates. Bigger plans start at $30 per month.

Organizing my Brain

Diigo synched to Delicious

Working online makes one a voracious consumer of information. One way that you can categorize all the information you see every day and turn it into your own personalized library is by tagging your links and saving them. I have saved nearly 7,000 links since I started doing this on Delicious. More recently, I imported all of my links into Diigo, and I love this tool. It allow you to annotate a link on the fly, add sticky notes and make public or private lists that you can share with others, and which allow them to see the web pages in a handy slideshow format. Since each tag has its own RSS feed, you can use a service like TwitterFeed to send the content to other social networks based on the tag you give it (no unsightly hashtags needed). Better yet, you can still synch back to Delicious, so that your extensive library of links is always backed up.

Hope you find one or two of these tools useful to improve your productivity. As with any tools, consistency of use is the key. There have been many tools I have used and abandoned, but these tools have “stuck” for me. Which tools have you found invaluable?

The post Seven Productivity Tools That Can Make You Better at Public Relations appeared first on Zoetica Media.

Cause marketing can be tricky.

You need to make sure the cause you are supporting aligns with your branding and that the two come together for a win-win. This is even more important if you are just one

Molson M, which is a craftsman version of Molson Beer brewed and sold in Canada, is conducting a cause marketing campaign that seems to get that balance right. Its massive Liquid Art campaign, which consists of outdoor advertising, video ads (see below) and a social media components, centers around the idea that beer making is an art, and like other art forms, it can be mastered.

“Every Medium Has Its Master”

Watch the video to get the gist of it, but of course they position Molson M as a master crafted beer.

MolsonM has agreed to donate $1 for every tweet that contains the hashtag #MolsonM_Art to the Canadian Art Foundation. They will donate up to $20K, according to their Twitter account. They also are painting a mural in Toronto at King and Church around a billboard of the Liquid Art creative. The mural contains all the Twitter handles of people who have Tweeted the hashtag.

The campaign was launched from its @MolsonM Twitter account, which didn’t exist before the campaign but now has over 1K followers. The Molson M Facebook page has over 15K connections.

The benefits of this campaign is that it connects Molson M with a community interested in art which would resonate with the concept of craftsman beer. They may also come to learn that Molson M’s craftsman beer is very different from the mainstream Molson Coors products. By connecting the brand to the artisan sensibility it has the potential to work to build Molson M some real value. Moreover, by tying to a venerable and respected arts organization in Canada, each person who participants know that he or she has benefitted a worthy charitable organization.

The campaign will continue for a few more weeks (May 2012) and the mural will come down sometime at the end of June.

What do you think about campaigns like this that take advantage of advertising, PR, and social media while adding a cause marketing component? What works for you and what doesn’t?

The post Social Media and Cause Marketing: How to Paint with a Tweet appeared first on Zoetica Media.

Last month, Instagram, a photo sharing social network, finally added an Android app. A few days later, Facebook bought them for an incredible amount of money. Of course, I immediately went out to find some MORE apps to play with Instagram and do our jobs better, of course, Why have one app when you can get five?

Here are my favorites so far, along with some ideas about how to use each of them for business. What apps are you loving for Instagram, and do they work on Android yet?

Postagram

What if you could take a cool picture of that new person that you met at a conference then send it to them as a postcard for 99 cents? Isn’t that way cooler than just sending an email like this, “So glad to have met you, yada, yada, yada?” I am headed to Mom 2.0 this week and plan to try Postagram out. You don’t even need Intagram to use it, you can also send photos from the website as well. Smart idea.

Webstgram

Search for hastagged photos using this search engine on Webstagram, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed for your searches in Google Reader, or whatever reader you use. To use it you have to login with your Instagram account

http://web.stagram.com/tag/webstgram/

Photo Grid

Photo Grid allows you to take 9 photos and rearrange them into a photo montage. It allows you tell the story of a moment in time and then share it to instagram, or anywhere else. It creates a Photo Grid folder in your camera application, and you can just pull from that folder in Instagram. I would classify this one eye candy, but you could use this photo to send make a photo to send as a Postagram to a group of people. From a brand perspective this could be a great way to make an impression, and you could include one photo with your logo or brand identity in it.

Personal Bonus: Lovestagram

So, what is the good of all business and no fun? Thought we would throw in Lovestagram, which allows you to send an e-card to the one you love. It allows you to use photos from Instagram. And this one has a fun back story. It was created by Kaitlyn Trigger, the girlfriend of Instagram’s co-founder Mike Krieger. She downloaded “Learn Python the Hard Way” to learn how to program and crated Lovestagram as a surprise for Krieger.

The post CoolTools: 4 Instagram Apps for Android and iPhone, too appeared first on Zoetica Media.

It is natural a to want to do more with less. Over the past few centuries we have relied more on machines to do a lot of our work for us. It was once thought that computers would help us do all of our work and we would sit by at our leisure and enjoy life. We are enterprising creatures, looking to get the most value out of the least amount of work.

It’s human nature.

As you know, that utopian world of non-working people and hard working machines hasn’t come to pass, but it won’t stop us from trying.

We Are Relying More on Systems

A couple of seemingly disconnected things have come together over the past few weeks to make me reimagine this world of machines anew.

First, I read Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter’s book Humanize, which made me consider how our companies have taken on the likeness of machines, and as such have lost some of their flexibility and adaptability.

Second, I heard about a new computer program that can write articles that are just as convincing, if a little less inspired, than human journalists. Read this article “Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?”

Third, I attended the Social Media Analytics Summit, where one of the arguments were around the idea that automated sentiment analysis is flawed and businesses should not use it to make decisions. Here is a really great post that explains why automated sentiment analysis is not very accurate.

Fourth, I heard a segment on NPR that pointed out a new computer program that can grade student papers more accurately than the teachers. Good news for over busy teachers, but maybe not so good for creative thought. Check out the story, “Can A Computer Grade Essays As Well As A Human? Maybe Even Better, Study Says.”

Finally, I heard about an experiment using a robot nanny. From the article, “80 percent [of kids] thought the robot was intelligent, while 60 percent thought it had feelings….The children didn’t believe that the robot had the right to be paid to work or vote in an election, and most felt that it was okay for it to be bought and sold.”

Taken separately, these things are just a great book, a concern about a type of analysis and interesting news stories. But in its totality, it got me to thinking about how we turn over more of our decision-making power to machines every year and how easy it has been for us (me included) to relinquish that power.

In our rush to increase productivity and get simple answers, we have reduced people down to single digit Klout scores, judged people by their avatar, and valued companies by their digital footprints.

The Digital Migration

The recent squabbles over the valuation of Facebook as it nears its IPO on one hand and the sale of Instagram for $1 billion US to Facebook show that our society has certainly moved online for good. Perhaps our collective move away from manufacturing and toward a service and knowledge-based economy have made this mass migration into the digital world inevitable.

After all, as humans we have been migrating since the start of time. Why should this be any different?

It seems that the sheer speed of this transition, more than any other in human history, is moving faster than we are adapting our laws, our social understanding or even our brains.

In an effort to “keep up” we turned over the mundane tasks to computers. This is all well in good, but now a “little” has turned into “a lot.” We regularly let machines determine what times are best to  tweet (Buffer), what words to use (Scribe SEO or Inbound Writer), or even what products to buy based on our values (Good Guide). Some of use use the Internet a little bit like we would an external brain (witness my Diigo account).

We are seeing the world through our own self-imposed , filtered glasses, but we forgot to take out the rose colored lenses.

The Trouble with Machines

There is so much good that comes with machines that it is hard to see the drawbacks, but here are six areas I think are impacted by machines. What are the drawbacks that you see?

• Lack of Thoughtfulness. Sure a computer can consider many options, as long as they has been programmed into the system. A human is much better at processing information and seeing the subtlety.  Moreover, we think more critically than a machine can do.
• Lack of adaptability. While it is true that neural networks can learn and “adapt” to new input, they can only consider the variables input into the system. What about information that is missing, body language and other clues for which it is very hard for a machine to understand or react.
• Loss of Creativity. If we rely on machines to relay information, there is not the same room for the creative turn of phrase. And what about breaking the rules of grammar to make a point. Get my point? The use of machines to set the standard for writing sets the bar too low.
• Autopilot Mistakes. When a system is on autopilot, even small deviations can eventually lead to huge accidents and unintended consequences. Machines can make recommendations and do the heavy lifting in a quicker time and with more accuracy than a human, but it isn’t as good at making decisions that require opinion.
• Spam. With the ability for machines to write for humans more convincingly, it leaves the door wide open for more spam sites and email. If humans don’t even have to write the stuff it becomes even more prevalent.
• Shallow Thinking. Some scientists and thinkers have hypothesized that our brains are being rewired to only have shallow thoughts. Even if you don’t completely buy that hypothesis (I don’t), it is true we have become a generation of skimmers. The sheer volume of information thrown at us every day necessitates it. More volume can only exacerbate the problem.

The post Machines are Doing More for Us Than Ever: But When is it Too Much? appeared first on Zoetica Media.

Mashing up data from multiple social networks seem like a great idea, certainly for marketers and those of use in public relations. However, unintended consequences can crop up pretty quickly.

Please Rob Me was probably the first such application to cause widespread concern. Its aggregated check ins from Foursquare announced when a person just checked out of their house. The owners of the site were trying to make a point about over sharing.

More recently a crop of online dating and meetup “services” have been released that have given rise to concern about personal safety.

PinPal Collects Data and Makes a Match

The most recent one is called PinPal, which was launched over the weekend into Beta. Jimmy Addison, the founder of Pinpal, was aggressively promoting and defending the service from the Twitter account @pinpalwizard last night. The service mashes up your Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, then looks up your Klout score to make potential matches.

Girls Around Me for Stalkers

Another service that recently made headlines as a potential safety hazard was the iPhone app, Girls Around Me. This service mashed up Foursquare checkins with Google maps and GPS to show you people who have checked in nearby your location. The app debuted in December and was downloaded 70,000 times before it was pulled from the app store after it lost its access to the Foursquare API. Its Russian developer, defended it in the Wall Street Journal, saying its “intention was simply to help people discover public venues nearby.”

FaceMatch Helps Make Love Connection

When I attended SxSW, I noticed an app from a Japanese company called FaceMatch, that supposedly lets your signal to someone on Facebook that you would like to get to know them better. I am not sure how it works since its website it pretty vague. Perhaps it is like a superpoke, or it deposits one of those awful posts on your timeline to join FaceMatch.

What do you think about all of this? Are we overstepping our bounds with technology by putting creativity before concerns about safety.

Would love your take.

UPDATE: The Pinpal service was an elaborate April Foos Day joke, here is how and why we did it. However, Girls Around Me and Facematch are real services, as is the app Cupitino, which was brought to my attention by Brian Block. That service matches you with other Mac lovers. Here is how they describe the service:

Cupidtino is a beautiful new dating site created for fans of Apple products by fans of Apple products. Why? Diehard Mac & Apple fans often have a lot in common – personalities, creative professions, a similar sense of style and aesthetics, taste, and a love for technology.

 

We believe these are enough fundamental reasons for two people to meet and fall in love, and so we created the first Mac-inspired dating site to help you find other Machearts around you.

The post New Internet Dating Sites (PinPal, Girls Around Me, FaceMatch) Compromise Safety appeared first on Zoetica Media.

You might be a little like me. You see the faces of starving children and your heart breaks a little. But you really have no idea how to make a difference beyond making a donation. Part of the way forward is awareness of the problem and how to solve it and recognition and encouragement of those women already on the front lines.

I am lucky that my day job allows me to work with organizations whose mission it is to make a difference. So I am always interested when I get a pitch from one that is using communication tools in a unique way, which is what I got from Oxfam America last week.

Best of all, you can easily get involved and it only takes two minutes.

In celebration of International Women’s Day this Thursday, March 8, Oxfam has put together a pretty original and compelling campaign to recognize women who are already making a difference in your community. They have put together two ways for you to do this immediately:

1. Send an International Women’s Day eCard to a woman you know, to say thank you for all that she does. Better yet, send it to several women who’ve made the world a better place.

2. Give the Oxfam America International Women’s Day 2012 award to a woman you think has made a difference to the world. She could be a teacher, your mom, a non-profit leader, a woman entrepreneur, the neighbor who always checks up on you when you’re ill… the possibilities are endless. You can send it as a PDF or print it out.

I plan to send out quite a few of these to some amazing women whom I know are changing the world. I hope you do the same.

Consider these facts:

• Sixty-six percent of the world’s work falls on women’s shoulders, yet they earn only 10% of the world’s income;
• If women were given the same level of access to resources that men have, they could increase yields on their farms by 20-30%;
• Hunger and poverty are about power and inequality, and women and girls face the biggest inequalities of all.

Watch the video to learn more about how Oxfam America helps to end hunger and injustice.

The post International Women’s Day: Doing Good Just Got Easier appeared first on Zoetica Media.