If you have ever thought that social media was a waste of time and delivered little in the way of results, stop and think for a moment of the recent events in Haiti. Within moments of the earthquake striking, news was coming out through Twitter. Other news services actually relied on some of these Tweets for initial reports and confirmation of damage. However, social media went further than that.

Within hours several charities like the Red Cross had sprung into action, using social media to call for help but also using social media to call for calm and to provide information on who to contact if you had friends or relatives in Haiti at the time. While not really social media, mobile phone users used SMS to send donations to one site, with 24 hours 10 million dollars (US) had been raised.

In years gone by, before the internet was born, news of these events took days and weeks to reach our ears. Charities that called for donations often had to wait months for promised funds to hit their accounts. Not so now, you can get online to anyone of a dozen or so charities and make a donation instantly. For the charities, the funds are available within hours, not days or weeks.

It has been a big event, particularly for those in the region. However, if you stand back and look at it with purely dispassionate marketing eyes, you can see how powerful social media can be. We will never make an impact as large as this with social media marketing – but do we need to? If our impact is 10%-20% as effective, we would be flooded in traffic. Social media marketing – there’s more power to it than most people realise – we just need to learn how to take advantage of it.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.