Twitterific! How Twitter sparked a viral contact message for the Philippine Red Cross

There have been countless stories about how social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter were instrumental catalysts in getting information across during the first hours of Typhoon Ondoy/Ketsana (and later, Typhoon Pepeng/Parma). Here’s one such inspiring story from the Philippine Red Cross.

Dennis Mendiola, Governor of the Philippine Red Cross (and also known as the co-founder of instant messaging giant Chikka.com), posted this account as a comment on my Facebook wall, which details how an RT’ed Tweet with Dick Gordon‘s number ended up saving lives. Gordon in this case is of course the Philippine senator and head of the local Red Cross.

Guess how the Red Cross saved lives on Sept 26 – the height of Ondoy’s rage? Someone tweeted Gordon’s cellphone. Then it got RT’d all over. People in need of help sent text messages to friends and family who were on more stable grounds and many overseas.

Then help requests came gushing in the thousands into Gordon’s phone, prompting him to replace his phone three times (because Nokia e90s get painfully slow at 1,000 unread messages with endless more streaming in).

Then cries for help were also being RT’d. Then they found @philredcross and @redcross143 on Twitter and the email address rescue@redcross.org.ph. The same got reposted on Facebook. At the end of the 12-hour marathon session of coordinating rescue efforts with our 7 teams of rescuers, hundreds were saved…

JG (Puzon) was there. He was in charge of farming out each request for help to the rescue teams while we peons did write each SOS on Post- Its. TRUE STORY.

The Philippine Red Cross is still accepting online donations via Paypal on its website. And if you think the urgency has past, just take a look at this video:

Hardcore Twitter: A Slideshare Success Story

I recently gave a presentation on Twitter techniques (and Twitter in the Philippines in general) at the recent SEMCON 2009 conference at the Intercon in Makati.

The presentation was entitled “Hardcore Twitter” and I’ve posted the deck on Slideshare. Of course it’s also embedded in this blog post, thanks to Slideshare’s WordPress.com friendly tags.

The basic idea behind the presentation is to illustrate that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have become so pervasive that if you’re considering any form of online communication strategy nowadays, you will have to include them. The old idea of developing a website and letting the campaign end there is simply not enough, no matter how SEO-optimized the site is. In order to maximize the reach of your digital strategy, you’ll need to craft a Facebook/Twitter strategy as well, and integrate these into the overall plan.

And if you want anything to go viral, the optimum point of infection is within these social networks themselves. Because of the way Facebook and Twitter are set up, viral memes usually start on these before infecting the rest of the web.

So I’ve covered some of the techniques you could use in the Twitterverse to do site promotion. The presentation explains all of this pretty well, so I suggest you go through that.

Part 2. Slideshare cometh. The second part of this story has to do with the reception the presentation got after the physical conference was concluded and I uploaded a PDF of the Keynote presentation to Slideshare.net. This was actually my first ever upload to the web service.

As is my usual practice with blog posts, immediately after I uploaded the file, I did the usual short message blast on my Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize this, and then walked away and forgot about it.

I was unprepared for what happened in just a few short hours. In no time, the presentation appeared on Sldeshare’s front page flagged on the “Hot on Twitter” (possibly due to a number of retweets) and then the “Hot on Facebook” sections.

By the end of the evening, “HardCore Twitter”  had cranked up enough page views to be selected as Slideshare’s “Presentation of the Day”. It actually lingered at the top of the heap for a couple of days before sliding down to fourth position. Even as a I write this, “Harcdore Twitter” is still listed on the “top presentations” list, and after 5 days online it has  generated (as I write this) 1,252 views.

I’m still wondering how it happened. Perhaps the provocative title was key (maybe the implication of kinky sex in a presentation sells just as well as in a streetcorner) or anything with the hot keyword “Twitter” in it gets immediate attention nowadays. In a very small scale, the presentation itself became as viral as the case studies it tried to explain.

At the end of the day, a lot more people ended up seeing my presentation online than they did on the day it was originally presented.

There’s a lesson to be learned somewhere in this case. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m definitely going to be using Slideshare a lot more now.