Regina Holliday dedicates the 73 cents Mural in Washington, DC; photo by tedeytan under CC license

Regina Holliday was at work teaching art when she got a call from her husband, Fred. The doctor had just told him he had growths and tumors in his kidneys. She rushed to the hospital to process the news with him and understand the diagnosis. Before she got there, Fred’s oncologist had left for a 4-day medical conference. Fred had kidney cancer and would die within months, but neither he nor Regina knew that because Fred was transferred to another medical facility and was not given a proper diagnosis nor his medical records for the next doctor to use. 

When Regina went to claim Fred’s records, she found they would cost 73 cents a page to print (they were several hundred pages), with a 21-day wait. When they did get copies, the records were inaccurate and incomplete. Frustrated by a lack of information from medical providers and the U.S. health care system, Regina reached out to her friend who suggested she talk to a patient advocate on Twitter, @ePatientDave, a stage-four kidney cancer survivor. 

Through Dave and other friends, Regina got answers and connected to the health advocacy community online. An artist, Regina painted a mural in DC about her ordeal, called 73 cents, which she promoted on Twitter, Facebook, and her blog. Soon CNN, BBC, CBS, and other traditional national news media picked up her story and she became part of the national health care debate in May 2009.

Regina did not know what Twitter was when she received the phone call from Fred in the hospital. However, she took a chance and with one tweet made connections to health advocacy groups she would never have found otherwise.

Twitter, Facebook, and blogs are tools that can amplify the message and build the network of any peacebuilder. Many of these tools even let you send messages from email or your mobile phone, so you do not always need a fast internet connection to use them. Your stories and ideas can spread to the right people further and faster than ever before. Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Create a Twitter account: You can follow interesting people and talk to them using special characters in your messages. You can even send messages called tweets using your mobile phone texting service.

2. Create a Facebook account: Either for yourself personally or your organization (to create an organization account, you will need to first create a personal account). You can add friends you already know, post pictures, videos, and stories to share with other people.

3. Start a blog: There are many free services, and I suggest Blogger, WordPress, or Posterous. You do not need to spend a lot of time or know much about technology. Just write a few articles about what you are passionate about and tell your friends and colleagues about it.

The world needs to hear your stories. In July 2010, a year after Fred passed away, Regina got a standing ovation for her speech at the Health Information Technology conference, on a stage with the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. How far can your story go if you use these social media tools?

You can learn more about Regina Holliday’s story in The Big Book of Social Media Case Studies, Stories, Perspectives by Robert Fine. Her mural, “73 cents,” is located at 5001 Connecticut Ave, Washington, DC 20008.

The non-profit blogger community couldn’t stop talking about Seth Godin’s “non” post of a few weeks ago.

Most of the conversation focused on his error calling out nonprofits for not being the most followed on Twitter.

I had to step in.

So I took a step back.

Right or wrong, Seth holds this opinion.  He is an/the expert marketer.  If he holds this view, there are probably others out there who do, too.  We should all talk about it together.

So I asked Seth if he would do an interview with Beth Kanter about Squidoo, his online referral site, and how it can give context to a nonprofit’s digital footprint.  He and Beth were more than willing, and that discussion will take place next month with the good folks at NTEN – Nonprofit Technology Network.

The focus will be on how nonprofits can not become meatball sundaes – Seth’s term and title of one of his books – for organizations that have not changed their structure and mission to be online.

I’m looking forward to the discussion!

Here is a helpful free eBook to help you find work using the social web by Chris Brogan, one of the most trusted leaders in this space right now:  Using the Social Web to Find Work.

He gives a useful overview of how to make the most of LinkedIn for building your network.  Great stuff.

Great discussion yesterday with Seth Godin, Holly Ross, and Beth Kanter about nonprofits, social media, and innovation.

Beth and Holly have great posts – read them before you read this because their sums were so good I’m going to write about something else.

I want to talk to the young professionals of our community.

I thought yesterday’s discussion would revolve around tactics to get other people to change – like how to prove a new technology to others in your org.

Really it was about how you can change – into a person who proves new technologies to others in your org.

I know of a technique that can help you do this.  You will think it is weird and unnecessary but you have to do it.  

It’s called personal branding.  It’s what we do now.

Personal branding forces you to figure out what you’re about and define that for others.

Some tools for this are starting a blog about your industry, commenting on other blogs about your industry, and learning as much as you possibly can about the problems in your industry.  For nonprofits it might be fund raising in an economic downturn, delivering food to Somalia, or getting people to come to your event.

Blog writing will force you to come up with what you really think about an issue.  It will help you gain your own clarity and insight, which can be empowering.   Keep it about business and ideas and not about your cat or work place annoyances.

On the right of this page you area reading are most of my favorite blogs.  Get yourself set up with Google Reader to have their updates come to you instead of wasting time going to them.  You can even read them on your iPhone.

After a few months you will have enough knowledge to start solving real problems in your industry and connections with other people who can make things happen.

Then it’s just up to you to get things done.

If you already have a blog and are out there making things happen, please post your link below so I and others can connect with you.

Update:  Great post on personal branding predictions for 2010 to check out.

Chris Guillebeau brought together around 30 members of his small army of remarkable people in DC at Busboys & Poets last week for a meetup.

Chris has the rare ability to make meaning for us world-changers while evading the guru trap by weaving strong ties among his readership.

Speaking of a small army, Seth Godin often talks about his new rule of 10 in new marketing – nowadays, all you need is 10 people to get something good going around your cause or project.

Chris built this in DC and introduced us to each other.  I met several remarkable people, like Jeff, Thursday,Vik,  Sheila, and Chase- only to name a few.

What’s cool is that they are all in the DC area and we actually got to know each other in person over quesadillas and beers at my favorite restaurant in DC.

Most of the people I met work in the nonprofit sector, which is not surprising given our city.  They work on various causes from the environment to equal access that are important and they are passionate about.

I do learning & networking events for a living, so the above 3 items are quite new and worth mentioning.

Below is my just under 9-minute discussion with Chris at the restaurant where he entertains my questions about how his work started in international development in Western Africa and spread from there.

Chris volunteered with Mercy Ships on the coast of West Africa for 4 years, went to grad school in international studies, and started The Art of Non-Conformity during grad school, which has now grown into a meaningful writing career with his upcoming book of the same title, due out next year.

If you work in international development or nonprofits, he is a good person to know.

Stuff we talk about:

Two of my favorite teachers are Seth Godin and Chris Brogan. Seth is an expert in marketing and Chris is an expert in Communications – two of my favorite business functions that at a nonprofit we all get to do in some form or another.

I have their books stacked up with Uncharitable by Dan Pallotta that I am reading now and fantasize like a nerd about how a conversation with those three would go.

I think it would help win an important battle in nonprofit operations PR.  We need nonprofit trust agents to educate themselves in new media and technology to spread the story that a nonprofit’s overhead is not a measure of its effectiveness or credibility.  Nancy Lublin has already gotten us started.  We need to talk about how innovations in mobile and internet technology create opportunities to transform nonprofit operations.  Operations needs more seats at program planning tables.

Trust Agents are people who humanize the web, understand the systems, and how to make their own game, connect, and build fluid relationships.  Does this sound like your CFO?

New Marketing allows us to know our audience, make things that they want, and tell them about it in places and ways they anticipate and want and to get out of their way.  Online marketing is about messages that spread between people, not one-way announcements or ads directed at people to interrupt them and gain their attention to hear a message they weren’t interested in hearing anyway.  New marketing does not ask, “How can we use this new marketing stuff?” but “How can we be an organization that people want to connect with in this new, transparent way?”  Does your HR director know about new marketing?

Maybe we can address this during the upcoming interview with Seth and NTEN.

This is the first blog post I am writing as I anticipate my upcoming interview with Seth Godin and the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN).

Many of you might not know what a Meatball Sundae is.  A Meatball Sundae is an organization that tries to add all of this new media fun stuff like Facebook and Myspace and Twitter and Google (the sundae part) on top of the same, tried and true, products they’ve been making for years (the meatball part).

The key is to not become a Meatball Sundae.

It’s not that the meatballs are bad and the sundae part is good.  It’s that they do not naturally work together.  One part or the whole thing must change in order for your organization to be successful now.

Did you know that?

Here’s a tip:  to move your organization online do so strategically – beyond interns on Twitter.

This is a senior management decision, although others in the organization can build the case.

As the picture above suggests, organizations fail when their marketing is not in sync with their organization.