Hi!
Here is a very interesting and useful online course on social media for development, It covers various social media resources for organizational development. Hope you will enjoy it as much as I do!

www.imarkgroup.org/moreAboutModule_en.asp?id=171

Hi there! I am very glad that you liked the social media support during the SuSanA meeting. It has been a great pleasure for me too and i hope that next time we can engage even more people. I myself also really liked the possibility of interaction between the people who were not able to come to the meeting. It has been great!

Yes, I also heard that Google+ is a good tool because it brings content directly to Google search and hence puts it higher in the search engine results. However, I have not used it professionally yet and I will look it up soon and write a post here about what I have found and then maybe we can pursue it for SuSanA as well.

I have also become a member of the WG1 and I just thought what if we start to make SuSanA chats from time to time on capacity building for example? The same can be done with other groups too. The the results can be posted to the Forum. What do you say?

AquaVerde wrote: Please keep in mind or be more aware, by using more and more social medias like Flickr, YouTube, Facebook or Google Drive ect, you will exclude more than 1/3 of the world from taking part in discussions about NASS aka ecosan aka protective sanitation!

In China, North Korea, Vietnam, Lao, Cuba and Iran social media sites are difficult to access, censored or banned.

Selected content of the website is available via offline media for those who can not get online.

@Elisabeth: thx for the summary!

Google+ matters as it enables a search for online content (which is not the default setting for Facebook due to different regional and privacy settings).

I believe that there is no single all-in-one site out there, so if we want to inform the public about sustainable sanitation, we should make use of all possible channels - even if that excludes some selected countries. That is: Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, e-mail signatures, Linkedin, Xing, this website, this forum et al.

Dear Colleagues and dear SUSANA-Office,
and
dear SuSanA meeting in Stockholm and Working groups meeting,

Please keep in mind or be more aware, by using more and more social medias like Flickr, YouTube, Facebook or Google Drive ect, you will exclude more than 1/3 of the world from taking part in discussions about NASS aka ecosan aka productive sanitation!

In China, North Korea, Vietnam, Lao, Cuba and Iran social media sites are difficult to access, censored or banned.

Best Regards,
Detlef

Dear Elisabeth,

Your post is interesting. I would like to read your thoughts, and that of Katja Bessonova, on the use of mobile phones, for increasing access to safe water and sanitation, in the developing countries.

Regards,

F H Mughal

What Carol said - Twitter and FB are great tools. We must also not forget about G+, btw.

Hello Carol!
Nice to meet you and certainly PHLUSH has a new follower!
Thank you for sharing your approach to Twitter. We, at SIANI, also try to get the most relevant and up-to-date content for our followers, however, we haven't done any discussions on key points yet. Could you, please, describe how do you do that?
Do you use any special apps for that like Tweet Deck?
Also how would you describe the response that you get through the discussions?

I have participated in the discussions that were organized by UNDP and UN and I think it was very interesting to follow in real time and to read what people asked and the answers. It also gives quite an interesting sample of the hottest topics on the key issues of the discussion. I assume that such analysis can be later used in website development, for instance, as an inspiration for a new article.

Trevor,
thank you for sharing! Indeed, it is very useful and interesting. My question is , how do you think is it okay for a research organization like SIANI or SuSanA to go very social, like this post is suggesting, and do jokes and personal Tweets and post photos from staff parties, for instance? Do yo think such strategy would be rather positive for image of a research organization or rather negative?

Hi all

Something I came across a while back that I found helped me to get started in the diverse world of twitter.

13 Twitter rules

1. You don’t have a 140 characters, you have 120 at the most
Remember, Twitter is not a monologue, it is a dialogue. You want people to engage with you, you want people to retweet you. If you use all 140 characters, the only choice they have is to click the retweet button, which means they can’t comment on it. I’ve found that my ideal tweets are about 100 characters. Including my 12-letter name, an RT, a space and the @ symbol, that’s 116 characters. My followers then have 24 characters to say what they want. Your number of characters are precious, so use link shortening sites like bit.ly or is.gd to reduce the amount of letters in your tweet.

2. This Isn’t A Popularity Contest
Twitter isn’t Facebook. It’s not a contest to collect as many friends as possible (I’ll follow you, if you follow me). If you genuinely use Twitter to follow others, you don’t want to clog your timeline with useless banter. Some people collect followers in order to grow their following. Don't be in this business. If you are to use Twitter effectively, it's not a popularity contest. I have found that if you truly are interested in using your Twitter feed, you can follow up to about 700 people. After that, a Twitter feed isn’t going to be an effective tool for you. Pare down your list every month so that you will be able to keep up with your changing interests and people who you realize aren't providing you with useful information. If you pique interest, people will follow you. Trust me.

3. Follow The Right People
Many who say that Twitter is a waste of time simply don’t take the time to follow the right people. Twitter is actually a time saver. If you follow the right people, you will be more efficient since the news is coming to you, rather than you going to it. You will find out news and information faster than if you went to search it out yourself. The easy way to follow the right people is to look at who is following you. They also might be worth following and since Twitter's "Find People" and “Who To Follow” tabs are shaky at best, it's often one of the best ways to make sure you are following the right people.

4. Know Who Follows You And Why People Follow You
You are followed for a reason. If it’s just your group of friends, you can write inside jokes all day that they’ll all understand. If you are followed by people outside your circle, doing that will only encourage them to leave. If you’re a comedian, be funny. If you don’t have something funny to say, don’t tweet it. If you’re a sports writer, tweet about sports, not what is at your family’s Thanksgiving table. Stick to your strengths.

5. Personal Tweets Are Fine Every Once In A While
I’m a sports business reporter, so I know that my followers rely on me to tweet about sports business. But I also love food and love to just observe strange things in life. This week, I went to the supermarket and saw a product I really loved. I took a picture of it, tweeted it out and it got more than 5,500 views. I want people to understand who I am as a person. I try to achieve a 90-10 ratio. Ninety percent of my tweets are going to be about sports business, the rest could be personal though definitely pass the interesting test. Former tennis player Justin Gimelstob tweeted a picture of his earwax once. It works because people follow him because he’s eccentric.

6. Don’t Be Afraid To Have More Than One Account
If I’m following you because I like your take on college football, I don’t want to all of sudden be bombarded by a stream of play by play tweets for UAB basketball because you graduated from there. If you want to, have a fan account that focuses on an area that isn’t the main reason people are following you, open up another account. Trust me, it will save you from losing followers. Colleges especially have to be careful with this. I follow a Northwestern fan feed because I want to follow play-by-play of the games on my Twitter feed. But Northwestern only provides a fan feed that allows me to see play-by-play of all teams. I don't want baseball and softball scores cluttering my feed. In this case, feeds should be broken down by sports. Companies not only need to be on Twitter, but they have to have a variety of different usernames. Some people just want coupons or rebates and they don’t want to hear about every store opening. No one said you could only have one name.

7. People Love Pictures
Some of my most successful tweets have been when I’ve simply taken a picture off the television. Like this shot of Patrick Ewing eating popcorn without his hands, while Orlando Magic coach Stan Van Gundy tried to give his halftime speech. To think that I just happened to catch that moment in time off the TV, and it was funny enough that 10,000 people viewed, is pretty remarkable.

8. Know When To Tweet
If you are tweeting during a big game, it’s obviously appropriate to tweet immediately, but if you have something that you consider gold, you should hold it until you have the greatest audience. Just because Twitter is an instant publishing tool doesn’t mean you have to publish everything instantly. I don't have any data to support overall Twitter trends, but — if all else is equal — I find that my content is most likely to get retweeted during the 9:30 am to 11 am ET timeframe. My tweets written before 7 am and after 10 pm are usually fighting the odds. That's why it's smart to save tweets for the perfect time.

9. There's No Such Thing As Tweeting Too Much
Are there a number of tweets per day that make people unfollow you? I've had people tell me that you can only tweet so much before people get tired with you clogging up their timeline. Not true. If you tweet quality, no one will stop following you. People don't get annoyed with your number of tweets. They get annoyed with the number of your tweets that are bad.

10. The Collective Twitterverse Is Smarter Than You
Use Twitter as a tool. Is what you think about a certain something indicative of how this nation thinks about it? If you want to understand more about this read James Surowiecki’s brilliant book, "The Wisdom Of Crowds.” It was written in 2004, but if you read it today and think about Twitter, it makes so much more sense. If I’m not sure about how I feel about something, I often poll my Twitter followers and many times I instantaneously discover that my opinion is in minority. Read your @ mail. That's not only to see who retweeted you, but also for suggestions on content. People who have six people following them smartly send me things to consider for a retweet. A guy sent me a cool Zamboni desk garbage. I tweeted it and gave him credit. Another follower of mine asked what was in the Under Armour combine gift bag? I found out, blogged it, and tweeted out the link. All they want is you to give them credit by mentioning their username. That’s not a lot to ask for the intellectual capital they are giving me in exchange. Sports teams and companies use Twitter to tell you what they are doing. They should also use the collective wisdom of the crowds on Twitter to find out what you think they should do. You might be the director of marketing for a team and you might think you’ve dreamed up every promotion. Well guess what? The totality of your fan base can do better than you. Don’t be scared to cross that bridge.

11. Don’t Trust Everything That Is Tweeted
If you are retweeting something that involves news, make sure the original tweet is from a reputable source. I've been on the wrong end of a retweet gone bad and it's not pretty. I even remember the date I did it because it burns that much. As more and more people retweet it, Twitter becomes like a game of telephone. The original source gets taken off and you are then left being the one that is reporting the news. Someone tweeted that ESPN Radio was saying that Magic Johnson was going to buy the Jacksonville Jaguars and move them to Los Angeles. When I contacted the person who tweeted it out, he told me that he wasn’t sure, but his friend told him that ESPN Radio said it. The guy didn't seem to care because he wasn't a journalist and there wasn't any consequences for his misfire. Others aren't as fortunate.

12. People Want To Laugh
No matter what you cover, or how you choose to tweet, humor is highly valued on Twitter. There's something magical about one sentence that can make you laugh. When one of my tweets gets on the front page of Twitter, odds are it made people laugh.

13. Walk Away
Unlike people that blog, where you have to continue to feed the beast, you can walk away from Twitter every once in a while. People won’t stop following you if you step back. It’s healthy to do that every once in a while, though I can’t tell you the last time I did that.

Source www.cnbc.com/id/40853842

Rgds
Trevor

Thank you for getting this discussion going. At PHLUSH we use Twitter to track developments in sanitation practice and policy, share them with others, and after reviewing documents initiate discussion on key points of interest. For example, we are likely to get the URL to an important study and convey its existence to our members and followers before most people have heard about it. We follow the larger organizations and research groups (and many of them follow us back.)

Since we're a volunteer-powered advocacy group, we also Tweet and RT (retweet) communications with elected officials, usually openly but sometimes as DMs (direct messages)

Our most recent Tweets appear in the left column of www.phlush.org. Since the left column of the SuSanA home page has space, why not get SuSanA to consider putting @susana_org tweets there?

@PortlandPHLUSH has 885 followers. Only 15 more and we'll have 900. Why not follow us? If you do, we'll send you a big public THANK YOU.

Dear participants of the SuSanA Forum,
I am currently working at SIANI as a communications assistant and also participate in one of the SEI's projects on Sanitation Policies in East Africa. Previously, I did my degree in Sustainable Development with final project devoted to Design of PPP for Waste Management in the Carribbean. My primarily interest is in the field of Communication for Development.

It is widely known that communication is at the heart of change and dissemination of knowledge is of highly importance for scaling up sustainable sanitation systems. Currently, the role of Social Media resources, such as Twitter, is becoming more and more prominent in communication for development. Utilizing social media is beleived to get messages around very fast as well as generate discussions and response among the public and can in fact do many other things. Have you ever tried to use Twitter or toher Social media in your work? If yes, please, share your experience and if you have not used it, please, share what you think about this tool.

Dear all
With the growing communication through social media there is more insight and knowledge coming out how it is used and what you can acheive .
This a link to the LSE public policy group blog which provides some insight for how to best use social medias
Cheers
Madeleine
blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2...nces-for-their-work/