Take 5 minutes in your lunch break today to check out Bnter – a new social site created to curate and share interesting conversations.

It looks a little something like this:

Sign up. Follow some people (follow me!). Have a laugh. Add your own.

I’m an early user, and a fan, of the site. Founded by Lauren Leto here in NYC it has some serious brains behind it, and a small but loyal (and growing) following. Bnter right now reminds me of Twitter back when having 100 followers was a HUGE deal.

All hail the power of data.

Today’s Politico email shared a great anecdote from ”In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives” by Steven Levy:

“Google was Obama territory [during the campaign], and vice versa. With its focus on speed, scale, and above all data, Google had identified and exploited the key ingredients for thinking and thriving in the Internet era. Barack Obama seemed to have integrated those concepts in his own approach to problem solving. Naturally, Googlers were excited to see what would happen when their successful methods were applied to Washington, D.C. They were optimistic that the Google worldview could prevail outside the Mountain View bubble. … [A]nyone visiting the Google campus during the election year could not miss a fervid swell of Obama-love. While some commentators wrung hands over the Spock-like nature of the senator’s personality, Googlers swooned over the dispassionate, reason-based approach he took to problem solving. … ‘It’s a selection bias,’ says Eric Schmidt of the unofficial choice of most of his employees. ‘The people here all have been selected very carefully, so obviously there’s going to be some prejudice in favor of a set of characteristics – highly educated, analytic, thoughtful, communicates well.’ …

“[O]ne of the company’s brightest young product managers, Dan Siroker [the Chrome browser], … got permission to take a few weeks off. … At [Obama] campaign headquarters in Chicago, Siroker began looking at the web efforts to recruit volunteers and solicit donations. … [H]e returned to Google to help launch Chrome. But over the July 4 weekend, he went back to Chicago to visit the friends he’d met on the campaign. Barack Obama walked through headquarters, and Siroker was introduced to him. He told the senator he was visiting from Google. Obama smiled. ‘I’ve been saying around here that we need a little more Google integration.’ That exchange with the candidate was enough to change Siroker’s course once more. Back in Mountain View, he told his bosses he was leaving for good. He became the chief analytics officer of the Obama campaign. …

“Just as Google ran endless experiments to find happy users, Siroker and his team used Google’s Website Optimizer [tool for testing site content] to run experiments to find happy contributors. The conventional wisdom had been to cadge donations by artful or emotional pitches, to engage people’s idealism or politics. Siroker ran a lot of A/B tests and found that by far the success came when you offered some sort of swag; a T-shirt or a coffee mug. Some of his more surprising tests came in figuring out what to put on the splash page, the one that greeted visitors when they went to Obama2008.com. Of four alternatives tested, the picture of Obama’s family drew the most clicks.

Last year I posted a couple of videos of my rugby team, the mighty Village Lions, in action – both on the field, and trying our hand at Portugese Bullfighting while over there on tour.

Not only has that video gone viral on Deadspin, we also just found out it was featured on TV in Colombia:

Surreal. But I’m glad I can check ’15 minutes of fame for wrestling livestock’ off my bucket list.

Right now I’m reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel – essentially a quick history of civilization and the role geography plays in shaping our past, present and future.

A chapter on technologies role in history yielded this interesting tidbit of info on the QWERTY keyboard that says a lot about human rationality and the power of vested interests:

Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right handed people have to use their weaker hand).

The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer sales people, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years.

Last week I was in Austin, Texas for the SXSW mega-conference – think Woodstock, for nerds.

While there I had the good pleasure to meet a great charity: water supporter and one of the smarter guys in the cause-marketing space, Simon Mainwaring, who shot this video with yours truly for his blog (apologies for the croaky voice… SXSW will do that!).

Simon is a must-follow if you’re interested in social media for social good, cause marketing or corporate social responsibility. And I’m not just saying that because he’s a fellow Aussie!

Right now he’s promoting his new book We First, one of the first books I’ve heard of that will laser in on the intersection between social media, social good and corporate strategy.

I’ve had the good fortune to be able to thumb through a pre-release copy of the book and can enthusiastically recommend you pre-order it here.

My boss Scott just took a handful of big charity: water donors to Africa.

There’s nothing like being able to say thank you to our supporters – so check out the video we made for Chris Sacca, featuring the hilarious Kristen Bell.

Update for Chris Sacca from northern Ethiopia. from charity: water (special donors) on Vimeo.

Last week I was the guest of the Personal Democracy Forum as they hosted one of their series of PdF Network conference calls, this one looking at charity: water’s success in online fundraising.

The PdF team were good enough to share audio of the event, and Micah Sifry put together a quick outline of the call I’ll share here:

• Money is a by-product of great connections and great content. Again and again, Paull explained how charity: water focuses on serving its supporters with content that is worth paying attention to, and on insuring that their experience working with the organization is “filled with delight.”
• There’s no “donate” button anywhere on charity: water’s Twitter or Facebook presences. Instead, those channels are used for what they do best, to help spread messages and build connections. Don’t view “donors as wallets,” he said. They’re people with whom to build rewarding relationships.
• Pay attention to (and share) all the great stories that your members may have to share. Paull talked about Riley Goodfellow, an 8-year-old supporter of charity: water who convinced her friends to eat rice and beans for a month, and then got their parents to donate the money saved on food, and who carried a water can to school each day to understand what it felt like to have to walk to a well each day to get clean water. (Her whole story is here.)
• Mycharitywater.com, the group’s distributed fundraising platform, has enabled thousands of people to build their own personal fundraising campaigns, many of them around donating their birthdays.
• This approach has to be embraced from the top of an organization or it won’t work. Hands-on training for leadership can help a lot, otherwise people tend to reject methods they don’t personally understand. Also, charity: water is very much a “digital start-up,” Paull noted, with something like a third of its core staff devoted to online organizing, web design, coding, etc.

Podcast for: Using Social Media for Non-Profit Fundraising- charity: water’s Success

-download podcast here or visit the PdF site to stream the audio.

Via the awesome Azita Ardakani, check out this 1994 video of Katie Couric and her fellow news anchors grappling with the @ symbol and Internet concept.

And Stephen Davies adds another pearler via the comment section:

I was asked the following question on Quora about charity: water’s online approach. For those of you not on Quora yet (you should be), I thought I’d share here as well.

What digital tactics have been most successful in building and engaging the charity: water audience?

Firstly, I must point out that looking at digital tactics in isolation doesn’t tell you much – there’s a real need to understand the digital strategy they are a part of to best understand our online success… but that’s for another question.

Some key tactics that have helped us build and engage our audience include:

Content

The importance of compelling content cannot be understated. We focus on producing entertaining, informative and inspiring content each and every day.

Video content has been particularly powerful for us (to get a good feel for this view the videos at http://charitywater.org/september) and is a continued focus for us.

Likewise, photography is important for our brand. We regularly share beautiful pictures from the field online as a way of helping our donors understand the change they can make in people’s lives.

The written word is important too – we have a full time blogger on staff who adds new content every day (http://charitywater.org/blog) and also writes longer stories to showcase on our site (http://www.charitywater.org/proj…)

Messaging

Not exactly a digital tactic, but the simplicity of our messaging is key to our online success.

Simple, compelling messages allow our audience to easily share the importance of the water issue:

• 1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water
• 4,500 children die every day from water related diseases
• More people die from lack of access to safe water and basic sanitation than all forms of violence, including war
• $20 can give one person clean water
• $5000 can fund a water project that can provide safe water to 250 people

These messages are simple for our audience to absorb and share. Because of this, I’ve seen 8 year old kids do a better job of telling the water story than I ever could.

mycharitywater.org

The fundraising platform mycharitywater.org has been incredibly successful for us, raising over $6 million in its first 15 months in operation.

Beyond just fundraising, mycharitywater plays an important role in building our online audience as each and every fundraising audience is also a Word Of Mouth marketing campaign.

Every fundraiser shares our content and our mission with their closest friends and family, a powerful way for us to connect with new audiences. The 6,000 fundraisers to date at mycharitywater.org have formed a grassroots movement that has taken our message and content and shared it with audiences we never could have reached otherwise.

Twitter

1.3 million Twitter followers attests to the importance of this channel for our cause. Twitter is an incredibly important venue for us – it’s where we share our latest news, launch online campaigns, connect with influencers and converse with our supporters.

In addition, Twitter is one of the favorite social networks of our supporters and one of the main places they share our content and promote their own fundraising campaigns.

Twitter has been one of our top 5 traffic drivers for the past 2 years.

Facebook

While for most the charity: water brand is synonymous with Twitter, Facebook is also a favorite venue for us and continues to become a more important site for us to engage with our supporters.

We use our Facebook page to talk to our inner-circle of supporters and try to give them a closer look into our day-to-day operations. During our September campaigns we posted behind the scenes videos on our fan page every day. In addition, the good folk at Buddy Media donated their Facebook platform to us, which has enabled us to expand our presence to add virtual gifts and other interactive elements.

As with Twitter, Facebook is also a favorite social network for our audience. Since the launch of the Open Graph in mid-2010 our Facebook traffic increased over 1000%. And as an example of how our audience can use Facebook on our behalf, we saw our greatest traffic day ever in September 2010 when Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith posted about their partnership with us (http://charitywater.org/willandjada) to their 10 million + fans.

In 2010, Facebook was our top referring site, only behind direct traffic and Google search, and for the first time outstripping Twitter in terms of unique visitors.

Happy to delve more into tactics and share other numbers, so please leave a comment if you’d like me to add any more thoughts

Is Foursquare big in Australia? Not really (yet), but it’s surely growing and getting a push in-store:

Snapped this photo yesterday in a Vodafone store at Cronulla beach, Sydney, Australia. A cricket wicket and a Foursquare blimp – I’m sure this is an unfamiliar vista for the Foursquare team back in NY, NY!