Two years ago I gave up my September birthday to a new-to-me non-profit named charity: water, little did I know this would eventually turn out to be a life-changing event.

Through this process I learned the full extent of the shocking truth of the world’s water crisis. I learned that close to one billion people lack access to clean water. I learned that unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation caused 80% of diseases and killed more people each year than all forms of violence (including war). And I learned that via charity: water and their 100% model (with every dollar heading directly to water projects) that $20 can give one person clean water for 20 years.

And today, I’ll make this mission the purpose of my work life as I join charity: water’s executive team as Director of Digital Engagement and Fundraising.

There’s a host of reasons I’m ecstatic to join the charity: water team, and not the least the amazing people I’ll be working with, led by our Founder Scott Harrison.

If I had to narrow my motivation down to 3 key items though, it would be the following:

1. The Cause: 1 in 8 people in the world lack access to clean water. It’s a problem that can be solved with the right mix of ingenuity, hard work and cold hard cash. It’s a gigantic task, but there’s few out there more worthy of taking on – the gift of water can truly transform lives.

2. The Model: Every single cent donated to charity: water is used to fund water projects. No waste. Administrative costs are covered by other donors: everything from our team’s wages to the ink in the office printer. No confusion. It’s a new approach to charity.

3. Proven Digital Innovation: A website that looks better than nearly any corporate. Every well that is built is marked on Google Maps. 1.3 million people follow them on Twitter, they were the focus of the first Twestival and they’re even held up as an example by Twitter for other causes. In short, this non-profit is a true digital organization.

Paull Young charity: water from Paull Young on Vimeo.

And the best part of all of this? YOU can help. I want your money, your sweat, your voice and your brain… or any of the above

Your Money - Make a Donation

The most important element for the millions without water is access to your money. As I said, as little as $20 can give one person clean water for 20 years. The first thing I’ve done as a charity: water employee is to ‘eat my own dogfood‘ and launch my own fundraising campaign – so if you were going to say congratulations remember there’s no better way to do so than by contributing $20 in my name! (and please do report back on the donation process – there’s nothing like feedback).

Your Sweat – Run a Fundraising Campaign

There’s only one thing I’ll love more than our donors in my new role, and that’s our fundraisers. There’s many ways you can raise money for the cause, you could give up your birthday for the cause just like Alyssa Milano, you could climb a mountain, heck, it’s so simple an 8 year old can do it! The only bounds are your creativity, and if you plan to fundraise for us do be sure to let me know!

Your Voice – Follow us Online and Spread the Word

Even if you can’t donate or fundraise right now there are a range of other things you can do to support us – importantly you can help spread the word and introduce us to your network. Please check out the links below and stay connected:

• Visit our site
• Subscribe to our blog
• Follow us on Twitter
• Like us on Facebook

Your Brain – Share your ideas, your connections, your organizations

Please feel free to reach out to me with any of your ideas or thoughts on how you can help. I’ll always have time for you and every piece of support is valuable.

I know many of you are marketers or corporate folk – I’d love to find ways to get the support of your clients, your employers and your coworkers. Likewise I know I’d like to draw on your professional expertise no matter what your background and skill set.

So if you’re interested in lending your professional support now or down the track please leave a comment or drop me an email, at least then I’ll know I can reach out to you in future without fear of being needy.

I’ll be trying to blog regularly here and share insights on how we continue to develop charity: water’s digital program. I hope you can all subscribe and come along for the ride!

Update:

My mate Joe Ciarallo over at PR Newser covered the move, and my former CEO Rob Key wrote a nice post bidding me farewell over at the Converseon blog.

The biggest rage in social media circles these days is social media expert bashing… mainly by people who wish someone would call them a social media expert.

Embedding my tweet from this arvo here to store this point for posterity so I can send it on each week when I see someone else talking about this topic on Twitter.

*yawn*

On a recent flight I read a New York Times article with a quote that was so perfect an illustration of the current state of corporate social media that I had to share it. And it wasn’t from the business section… social media is so mainstream these days that it even rears its ugly head in a Napa Valley article in the dining section.

Specifically:

Mike Grgich, the founder of Grgich Hills Estate, distrusted computers so intensely that for decades he insisted on handwritten accounting. No more. At 87, Mr. Grgich recently bellowed to his staff: “We have to upgrade everything! Get me Facebook and Twitter!” recalled Ivo Jeramaz, a vice president at the winery who is also Mr. Grgich’s nephew.

“We nearly fell off our chairs,” Mr. Jeramaz said.

This sounds like so many brands I talk to these days. They’ve got the social media laundry list: Facebook Page (Check!), Twitter account (Check!), YouTube (Check!), Blog (Check!). Much more rarely will they have a real strategy, nor specific and measurable objectives (and I’m taking nothing away from Grgich Hills Estate here, in fact I applaud their forward thinking).

Yes there are a huge amount of potential benefits social media and new web tools can deliver to organizations… but only if you realize that they are just tools. Without the right strategy and without the internal readiness to really listen to your stakeholders then they’ll be as useless as tits on a bull (to share a great Australianism ).

So from now when I’m assessing corporate social media efforts I won’t be looking at their Facebook fan count (likely inflated with media dollars and freebies). I won’t be looking at the cool design on the background of their Twitter page. I’ll be looking for them to tell me about the changes they made internally to properly use the tools, I’ll be asking them to talk about how they measured impact on business objectives, and I’ll be hoping they can tell me how the tools they selected fit into their wider communications plan.

I find myself echoing the thoughts of my Converseon CEO Rob Key here, who recently shared a word cloud in iMedia Connection generated from the online conversation around the term ‘social media’ and found the same situation:

Rob says it well:

The conversation is dominated by technologies and platforms. Perhaps not surprisingly the primary words are “Facebook” and “Twitter.” Not far behind are a range of tactics and pithy statements (ideally fewer than 140 characters). This is not a strategic conversation. It is, frankly, reflective of a relatively immature discussion.

A funky Facebook and Twitter page certainly has ‘cool’ factor, but in the long run I think you’ll find measurable impact on business objectives to be a fair bit funkier.

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Christmas Day last year was the first time in history that Facebook attracted more traffic than Google. The Facebook bandwagon just keeps growing, but at the same time its biggest threat is looming on the horizon: privacy.

I recently blogged some Facebook privacy tips as I know that most users really don’t understand just how public their data is. As a marketer I’m a huge proponent of the benefits Facebook can bring for brands, as an individual I’m a big fan of having access to all my friends around the globe, but as a citizen I’m increasingly concerned about Facebook’s blase attitude to privacy.

Could privacy issues eventually kill the Goose laying the Golden Eggs? We’ll see… but in the meantime I found myself nodding my head in agreement as I read Danah Boyd’s typically brilliant keynote at WWW2010 ‘Privacy and Publicity in the Context of Big Data‘

The full transcript is absolutely worth a read, and I’ve pulled out some key sections on Facebook here to give you a flavor:

When Facebook first launched in 2004, it started as a niche social network site that was only accessible to those privileged enough to have a Harvard.edu email address.  As it spread to other universities, it built its reputation on being a closed system.  People trusted the service because they felt it provided boundaries that helped people navigate social norms. As it grew, it was interpreted as the anti-MySpace.  While MySpace was all about publicly accessible content, Facebook was closed and intimate, a more genuine “place for friends.”  As I roamed the United States interviewing teens and others, I was continuously told that Facebook was more private.  For some, that was the precise reason that they loved the site.

First impressions matter and people will go to great lengths to twist any new information that they receive to fit their first impression rather than trying to alter it.  To this day, many average people still associate Facebook with privacy. They believe that they understand how their information flows on Facebook and believe that they understand the tools that allow them to control what is going on.  Unfortunately, their confidence obscures the fact that most don’t actually understand the privacy settings or what they mean.

During its tenure, Facebook has made a series of moves that have complicated people’s understanding of context, resulting in numerous outpourings of frustration over privacy.

Facebook is highly incentivized to encourage people to make their data more publicly accessible.  But most people would not opt-in to such a change if they understood what was happening. As a result, Facebook’s initial defaults were viewed as deceptive by regulators in Canada and Europe.  I interviewed people about their settings.  Most had no idea that there was a change.  I asked them to describe what their privacy settings were and then asked them to look at them with me; I was depressed to learn that these never matched.  (Notably, everyone that I talked to changed their settings to more private once they saw what their settings did.)

Facebook has slowly dismantled the protective walls that made users trust Facebook.  Going public is not inherently bad – there are plenty of websites out there where people are even more publicly accessible by default.  But Facebook started out one way and is slowly changed, leaving users either clueless or confused or outright screwed.  This is fundamentally how contexts get changed in ways that make people’s lives really complicated.  Facebook users are the proverbial boiling frog – they jumped in when the water was cold but the water has slowly been heating up and some users are getting cooked.

Social Plugins and Instant Personalizer are more like Beacon than like News Feed. It’s not shoved in people’s faces; they don’t understand what’s happening; they don’t know how to adjust. When Facebook makes a change that’s in people’s faces, they react extremely negatively.  When they make a change that’s not as visible, people don’t understand what’s happening until it’s too late. That’s a dangerous cycle to get into, especially when you think of all of the third parties who are engaged in exposing people without them realizing it.

Big announcements from Facebook this week… and even more privacy concerns. Do you have any idea how public or private your account and data is?

I was shocked by how open my account was, and how much access I was giving to third parties. While you’ll never have real privacy with Facebook (or anywhere on the Internet) here’s a few tips on how to keep your data a little more secured. I’ve gone through each of the below (and I’d class myself as a very savvy Facebook user) and I was still wide open.

As ReadWriteWeb strongly put it:

Doing this won’t eliminate risk entirely – nothing can do that – but it’s a good first step in reducing risk. However, as long as you have a Facebook account, your data won’t be private. If true privacy is really a concern for you, it may be time to find that account delete button instead. (Hint: it’s under “Account Settings.”)

AllFacebook: 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook.  I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook.

Bryce Tom: Control What Your Friends Can Share About You on Facebook

With all this talk about Facebook’s social graph, I decided to take a look under the hood to see what all the privacy discussions were about… Holy crap! The fact that my friends would be able to share this much info about me to 3rd party vendors is a bit insane. To change your settings, log in to your FB account, and click here.

ReadWriteWeb: How To Delete Facebook Applications and Why You Should

The new policy, however, brings to light something that your average Facebook user may not have ever known at all: Facebook applications access your personal data.

To the end user, these changes may sound overwhelming and even scary. But there is something very easy everyone can do to minimize their risk and that’s delete the Facebook applications you no longer use.

The process of doing so is incredibly simple.

After signing into Facebook, do the following:

1. Click on “Account” at the top-right of the screen.
2. Click “Application Settings”
3. Change the “Show” drop-down box to “Authorized.” This will show all the applications you’ve ever given permission to.
4. In the resulting list, click the “X” button on the far right next to each app you want to remove to delete it.
5. On the pop-up box that appears, click “Remove” then click “Okay” on the next box confirming the app was deleted.

Repeat this process to remove all the apps you no longer use on a regular basis.

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I’m heading to an interesting event put on by the Aussie consulate in NYC tomorrow night, Social Media and Democracy: The New Era of the Citizen Elect (who knew the editor of the WSJ is an Aussie?)

Let me know if you’re in NYC and want to tag along – and yes, I’ll be sure to live-tweet it and post some follow up thoughts here.

From the Advance site:

Victorians Abroad and Advance invite you to Social Media & Democracy: The New Era of the Citizen Elect at 6pm on Wednesday 21 April.

Keynote speaker:

Editor-in-Chief, Wall Street Journal

Panelists:

Andrew Rasiej

Founder, Personal Democracy Forum

Vice President of Communications, NARAL Pro-Choice New York / National Institute for Reproductive Health

With questions moderated by:
Evan Ratliff, contributing editor, Wired magazine and writer for The New Yorker, New York Times, Sunday Magazine, Men’s Journal.

Wednesday 21 April, 2010

6.00pm to 9.00pm

Bowne

Level 50, 55 Water Street

New York, NY  10041

Last week I did a guest lecture on transparency with my good friend Kelli Matthew’s J412 class at the University of Oregon (via skype – I wish I’d been out there in person!).

Kelli’s students are a bright bunch, so I’ll mainly highlight their thoughts here as they live-tweeted the lecture. I joined them to talk about astroturfing and some other issues as I’m quoted in their course text, Shel Holtz and John Haven’s excellent Tactical Transparency.

My speaking notes were brief and included the examples below along with a look at WOMMA’s code of ethics and Honesty ROI.

Examples

• Whole Foods CEO John Mackey poses as Rahodeb on Yahoo Finance Boards
• Ribena’s vitamin C lies uncovered by two 14 year old girls in New Zealand
• My client Graco’s proactive issue management communication
• Martin Eisendstadt’s fake profile fooling the US media in the 2009 Republican Primaries

Tweets From The Students

Kelli told me her students were a bright bunch and they didn’t disappoint. Here are a selection of their best tweets from the lecture that should give a flavor of the conversation.

Thanks again for being a great audience J412!

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This post is spurred by the spontaneous explosion of Glee related excitement stemming from the women I follow on Twitter right at this moment.

Here’s a quick look at the #Glee related enthusiasm appearing in my Twitter stream right now:

But this phenomenon does seem to be isolated to women (well, a few of my gay mates are also pretty darn excited), and the male/female divide has never been more evident than the current Google Hot Trends rankings:

#3: ‘what time is Glee on Tonight?’

#5: ‘Ashley Dupre Playboy pictures’

So essentially, while every woman in America is pining for Glee to start, every male is trying to find pictures of a former call girl in the nud.

NB: If you’re not familiar with Google Hot Trends Wikipedia has a good explanation. I keep track of it via RSS – it’s interesting keeping a finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist via its hourly updates!

Google Hot Trends is an addition to Google Trends which displays the top 20 hot searches (search-terms) of the past hour in the United States. For each of the search-terms, it provides a 24-hour search-volume graph as well as blog, news and web search results. Hot Trends has a history feature for those wishing to browse past hot searches.

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Like many of the uber-geeks out there, I’ve become a big fan of location-based social network Foursquare. Like Twitter 3 years back, it’s the domain of early adopters, and just like Twitter it is beginning to draw a lot of hype and attention from marketers.

But does Foursquare hold value for those who don’t live deep within the social media universe? Is accruing badges and broadcasting your whereabouts something that will really breakthrough with the masses? Some recent personal experiences have shown me that there is value: especially when your network of connections hits critical mass.

The first real ‘a-ha’ moment for me came from SXSW this year when Foursquare told me my long-time online friend Beth Kanter was also at Austin airport. This led to a chance tweetup with JD Lasica and others that turned what would have been a frustrating flight delay into an enjoyable experience.

Beth posted a nice rundown of that experience:

When I left SXSW, I used Foursquare to check into the Austin Airport. Three minutes later I got a tweet from a colleague, Robert Fabricant, who I hadn’t seen since we were on the faculty at PopTech and didn’t realize was attending SXSW.  Then I got a dm from Paull Young who I didn’t get a chance to talk to during the conference.

Also delayed was another colleague, JD Lasica. So, instead of reading trashy magazines, I got a chance to have a great conversation with some colleagues.

It demonstrates that you need to have a critical mass of friends using the platform in close proximity.  SXSW and perhaps the NTC would be the only places where that would happen.

Foursquare in Action

This weekend a trip to Chicago (mum is in town from Australia) led to a bunch of truly useful actions, enabled via Foursquare.

After a great brunch with Phil and Leticia Gomes we headed to Chicago’s iconic Art Institute, and my check in revealed that the ‘Mayor’ of that venue gets free access to a special event. In addition, the History Channel provided a few tips alongside those from the crowd.

After leaving the Art Institute we entered Millenium Park, where an innovative Explore Chicago program left some informative Foursquare tips, and another user gave some great advice on how to photograph the famous ‘Bean’ sculpture.

As we headed back to the hotel a tip on Twitter sent us to the Atwood Cafe for a quick bite, upon checking-in Phil Gomes popped up for the second time that day and directed me to order the calamari.

And finally, the day capped off with arrival in Kohler, Wisconsin and spotting a friendly face via my client John Engberg appearing as mayor of their magnificent American Club.

So a day in the life with Foursquare proves it can be pretty darn useful – especially when you’re on the road!

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Christiaan Van Vurren is the greatest contribution Australia’s made to the social media scene.

Fighting tuberculosis, his excessive time locked in quarantine has given him plenty of time to produce a bunch of hilarious YouTube videos via his alter ego the ‘Fully Sick Rapper‘.

Enjoy:

And to make a serious point, I actually think this is a great (if extreme) example of Clay Shirky’s thesis on ‘social surplus’. Essentially, the rise of social tools and self-publishing allows humanity to use their ‘social surplus’ to create and add value, as opposed to dumbly sitting in front of a television screen.

Much the same as peasants would drink themselves into a gin stupor during the industrial revolution, and also how in the past a bloke in quarantine would have to spend his days reading, watching DVDs and masticating (you’ve gotta watch the vid above to get that joke), instead of producing media that is generating hundreds of thousands of views and global attention.