Evan Bartlett ‘s blog

My friend Rachel is traveling the world doing all kinds of crazy things, and you can see her wordpres travel blog here.  The problem is, she’s got no pics in her posts!

So she needed to know how to post pictures from her flickr.com account into her blog posts on wordpress.com

Here goes:

Adding a Flickr Photo to a Post on WordPress.com

Fred Wilson put up a good post almost a week ago about blogging for a cause, which lead me to Zemanta’s (Fred invested in them) Blogging for a Cause campagin.

Since I’m already on quite a roll about Kiva, I figured why not post one more time about why I think they’re such a great organization:

1) Transparency

In todays world of stock market scandals and top secret government documents, I want to see whats going on behind the curtain.  Kiva takes transparency to the max, and it shows in every aspect of their business.  Here they are working with Ernst & Young to be more transparent, and here’s a group of hard core supporters dedicated to making Kiva stays transparent! 

2) Scalability

Kiva has the ability to touch a lot of people and make a difference.  They’ve loaned out $73million from nearly 500,000 lenders to 175,000 entrepreneurs.  Wow.  Those are some huge numbers, and they’re growing every day.  The more time I spend on social media for Kiva, the more I realize how many future lenders still don’t know about Kiva.org!

3) Efficiency

In only four years with under 30 full time employees they did all this!

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This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

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After getting the “@kiva” name on twitter I wanted to get the word out that Kiva.org now officially had a twitter presence that people could remember.  Prior to that we had been using @kivacs and @kivadotorg, and people were mistakenly assuming that we were @kiva.

Inspired by Charlie O’Donnell’s co-opting of Follow Friday to promote the launch of his company, path101, i wanted to do the same for Kiva.  The idea was to get as many people as possible recommending @kiva for Follow Friday using the #followfriday hashtags, in the hopes of gaining 1k followers.  To set the scene, we emailed all of kiva’s mailing lists (700+) and 20+ of the top people I could think of on Twitter (which isn’t exactly an impressive list).

Here are the rough stats we got on Follow Friday May the 15th (which we started with around 2400 followers):

New Followers :200

Follow Friday Recommendations : 90

I did a quick run through of those 90 people who gave us a shout out, and combined they had 46,000 followers.  Thats 500 followers on average, so we’re not talking about a bunch of new accounts here.

We also posted about the initiative to our blog, and to our Facebook page, which had 40k fans at the time. Later in the day 2pm PST, we even got posted on@micah’s (the creator of follow friday) www.followfridays.com Feature Followers section.

Here’s what the day looked like on TwitterCounter, you can just barely see the graph curve up a bit more  on May 15th  We went up from gaining an average of a 150 users each day to over 200:

Since my goal for the day had been to add 1k new followers, I was a bit dissapointed.  I’d love to know what other people expect when doing this kind of campaign.  My buddy Dan Martell has a similar post on his blog, which can be used as a comparable.  A guest blogger, @coryschop , does an 8 hour experiment and gains 83 new followers.

As part of Kiva.org‘s Community Outreach team, I was working on trying to get the “@kiva” account rather than continuing to use our “@kivacs” and “@kivadotorg” accounts.  I had contacted Twitter’s official support site, one of their investors, and googled the heck out of “how to get your organization’s name on Twitter”.  None of these yielded results, so I contacted the @kiva user directly.

After several “@” messages and looking at her tweet frequency I realized she wasn’t actively using the service and probably wasn’t receiving my messages.

At that point I got the idea from @ryanmilini to follow all her friends, hoping that one of them follows me back or checks their @’s.  You can see my desperate attempts here and here !

Apparently that got through because very soon after I had a tweet from Kiva (yes, her name was Kiva!) telling me she would be happy to hand over the user name!  Great to see that people are willing to help out for such a good cause.

Hopefully this trick can help other nonprofits / orgs/ charities get their names on twitter too.  Stalking her friends wasn’t immediatly apparent to me!