Social media for social good: The UN’s special Social Media Envoys

What do Ryan Seacrest, malaria and the U.N. have to do with this blog? Well, a lot, actually.

Last Monday, the U.N.’s Special Envoy for Malaria announced that for the next year, a group of special Social Media Envoys (including Ryan Seabiscuit Seacrest, Arianna Huffington, and Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, NJ) would be tweeting and facebooking to raise awareness of and support for the U.N.’s malaria control program. Each Social Media Envoy is a prominent person with a large social media or traditional media following, and each has agreed to “take one social action, such as a tweet on Twitter or a wall post on Facebook” advocating for malaria control at least once a month for the next 12 months.

Image: Corey Booker's and the Social Media Envoy initiative

“Interesting initiative,” I thought. “Nice use of influential people to reach a wider audience about an important issue. Might make an interesting blog post.”

So here it is, a blog post about the good, the bad and the questions raised in the launch of this new and ambitious U.N. project.

The good

• Influential people get your message across better than you can. For better or worse, in the world of social media, Ryan Seacrest has more influence and can reach more people than the U.N. Special Envoy for Malaria, Ray Chambers. This Social Media Envoy program recognizes that and, rather than setting up an @malariaprogress Twitter account which the Special Envoy’s office would have to work hard to promote and maintain, uses people who are influential in the medium it’s interested in — social media — to do the work and consequently reach more people, more effectively than the Special Envoy’s communication team could on its own. Sure, using influencers to reach your audiences credibly is PR 101, but it’s nice to see that being done in the social media world, where I think sometimes the power of existing social media influencers can get forgotten in enthusiasm for setting up your company’s or cause’s own Facebook page or Twitter account.

The bad

• Where are the links? Though the news release and the Mashable article that first announced the initiative included links to the Twitter pages of each special Social Media Envoy, Malaria Progress — the main site explaining and tracking the work of the Special Envoy for Malaria — barely mentions, and only minimally links to, its Social Media Envoys. The only information on Malaria Progress about the initiative is in a text-only news release, linked to through a small, text-only news item on the homepage. For a program that’s all about social media, engagement and sharing, I’d have liked to see the Malaria Progess site integrate more social tools like sharing buttons, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube icons, and links to the social media sites of each of the envoys, to help make more people aware of the initiative and to get visitors to the site involved in helping to spread its messages even further.
• Lack of coordination. Clicking on the links for a few of the Social Media Envoys after reading the Mashable article announcing this initiative, I expected to see each person tweeting something about the announcement and their involvement with it. Disappointingly few of them had though. Launching a communication program that’s all about a few people’s social media actions without those people taking any social media action at the time of launch seemed like a wasted opportunity to me. 

The questions raised

• Will it work? Nice though it is to see the U.N. getting involved in social media for social good, and extending its concept of Goodwill Ambassadors into the Web, this initiative raised a good few questions with me:
  • Will the Social Media Envoys use their ‘social actions’ to ask their followers to take specific online or offline actions? If not, how successful will this initiative be in achieving its goals of supporting the U.N. Secretary-General’s goal of “universal bed-net coverage” by 2010 and “near-zero” malaria deaths by 2015?
  • Is one social action a month by each of these people enough to achieve this initiative’s goals? Or is is too much? Or too arbitrary?
  • Is putting a limit of a year on this initiative the right way to achieve lasting action against malaria?

I’ll be interested to see what happens with this over the next year and will be keeping an eye on it. It might even make an interesting capstone project, methinks…

Thanks to Farra at Big Duck for putting me on to this initiative.