Social media comes of age: Lessons from the Haiti Earthquake

A little over three months ago, the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) asked me and a few colleagues to help them look at the lessons that can be learned from the work of reconstruction and rebuilding lives that were done following the Tsunami. Little did we realise at that time that another 200,000 people will perish in a sixty-second disaster in one of the poorest countries in the world, Haiti, while we were still trying to understand how future disaster risks could be reduced for people likely to face the threats of disasters. What has happened in this poorest nation in the western hemisphere is no less calamitous than the Tsunami which killed over 230,000 across five countries. However, I find it heartening to note some interesting departures from the way international community, governments and the media in particular in responding to the suffering caused by this disaster.

After the Tsunami which shocked us all into a stupor when the media was beaming out gory pictures of giant waves swallowing up whatever and whoever came in its path, the governments, aid agencies and humanitarian organisations assured the survivors and the displaced that all will be taken care of, and they would be back on their feet within a year or so. We now know – as did most of the agencies back then – that it took at least 3-5 years’ of hard work to bring people back to some semblance of normal lives. Yet such was the power of the media hype and the emotional reaction to the shock and horror of the Tsunami that everyone got carried away and made promises which, rationally speaking, no amount of funds could deliver within one year as was promised.

After the Haiti quake, we saw a more mature portrayal of the crisis that was unfolding: the catastrophic destruction and damages aside, we also saw the challenges in providing any rescue or relief operations, the lack of infrastructure for providing relief and why aid was slow in reaching out to the affected communities. Just a week after the earthquake, several big donor agencies including the World Bank and the UN proclaimed that it would take nearly ten years, if not more, to rebuild the country.

Has this made people less generous to donate to the cause of the Haitians? Going by the trend in Europe and America, this does not seem to be the case. Although Haiti may break the highest-ever funds raised for Tsunami, the DEC in the UK has already raised over £65 million, and is still counting even after three weeks into the appeal. And in the US, you will be overwhelmed by the extensive range of methods being deployed for fundraising for Haiti, right from celebrity events, breakfast parties, product sales to collection tins and appeals on the cab you are travelling in. Public generosity hasn’t waned despite the tardy response and the challenges in delivering aid that have been brought home to the donors. A vital role played in this positive transformation has been that of the social media, the facebookers, twitters, Diggers and Myspacers who have told numerous stories and eye-witness accounts of the situation as it started unfolding from day one. I have been following dozens of facebookers and twitters – all individuals, ordinary citizens, committed humanitarians and charity workers– and it amazes me to see how mature the understanding of the complexity of the situation is, something quite simply was missing for weeks and months after the Tsunami disaster.

Another interesting development I have seen after the Haiti earthquake is the use of social media for social marketing. The DEC has twittered its way to growing a following of over 2,500 from none four weeks ago, and has over 16,000 fans on facebook, all helping to spread its message. The beauty of the social media is that it costs you no cash to grow a support base, unlike direct mails or print and audio-visual media.

Charities and humanitarian organisations have not so far utilised the power of social media fully for their marketing purposes. But after the Haiti experience, I think this is going to grow big in charity marketing.

Do Corpses Bleed?

In my last story, I talked about setting goals and how some people are hugely successful in achieving what they set out to do, while others are much less successful. Our beliefs play an important role in influencing how we succeed or fail. Changing limiting-beliefs require one to have an open mind. There is an old story described by Abraham Maslow that illustrates this. A psychiatrist was treating a man who believed he was a corpse. Despite all the psychiatrist's logical arguments, the man persisted in his belief. In a flash of inspiration, the psychiatrist asked the man "Do corpses bleed?" The patient replied, 'That's ridiculous! Of course corpses don't bleed." After first asking for permission, the psychiatrist pricked the man's finger and produced a drop of bright red blood. The patient looked at his bleeding finger with abject astonishment and exclaimed: "I'll be damned, corpses do bleed!"

Your Beliefs Are Acquired, Not Inborn

The good news about beliefs is that all beliefs are learned. They can therefore be unlearned, especially if they are not helpful. When you came into the world, you had no beliefs at all - about yourself, your religion, your political party, other people, or the world in general. Just as you once shed your belief that Santa Claus or tooth fairy was real, you can shed any belief or acquire new beliefs if you want to.

In my coaching work, I have been working with a gentleman (we will call him Jim) who has been, what I would call, a successful businessman. At sixty-six, he runs a family business, with a turnover of a slightly over a million pounds. On the surface, he is happy –he makes a decent living from his business which is managed by a Chief Executive and his team. But somewhere in his mind is a long unhappiness that his business wasn’t growing over the years. He has had his close circle of friends desert him as they grew their businesses and some of them became multi-millionaires. They grew up together, spent their youths together, set up business together, and went to the same golf clubs. Suddenly in the last ten years, Jim noticed he was getting cold shouldered by some of them as they had moved on to being friends with more successful, richer people.

Losing his friends and self-esteem, Jim invested all the time and finance he could master in his business in the past three years, wanting to expand his business. He has worked closely with his Chief Executive and management team to push for business growth and expansion. But nothing has really made much of a difference in their business – Jim’s company manufactures DIY tools for well known brands like Black & Decker, Draper tools, Bosch, etc. Competition has been stiff as manufacturing moved to Asia and Eastern Europe. Jim’s company has had to work harder and harder to stay where they were. He had no doubt that his management team had done all they could.

It turned out some of his friends have ridden on this wave of global change and moved their production to China, and that’s how they grew their business several-fold, while Jim saw that same change a block to his business. Jim did not want to take risks. He likes his management team because they run the business in the way he ran it for two decades, and they don’t take risks. Although Jim pushes them to expand, he subconsciously likes it when they come back with the explanation that times are difficult with competition from the emerging countries.

All his life Jim has valued safety and security, and avoided risks. Back in his teen years, he joined horse-riding and football. A couple of times he came home slightly injured. His loving mother who had his best in her heart always advised him not to do those risky sports. He will be no good in those.

In his later years, he would go to the skiing slopes of Swiss Alps and would spend his days there sipping wine while his wife would be go skiing with their children.

Jim had managed his entire business with this single motto: don’t get hurt; don’t take risks so that you do not fail. Be safe!

Once he realised how a few childhood incidents had such a grip over him throughout his life, it was easy to make a change – the safety advice he got in childhood was no longer relevant to run his business. And one of the first things he has done in the past few months is to hire a dynamic CEO who is a risk-taker and has proven track record of growing businesses he has managed.



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How you can guarantee success with the goals you set

Last week I talked about three critical steps towards setting and achiveing goals. In that I had mentioned about a research done by Harvard Universtiy on graduating students, and they found that only 3 per cent of the students had set written goals and ten years later, they were the ones who were most successful amongs the peer group.

In fact, the research did not stop there. A few years later, another University (Dominican University) carried out slightly more elaborate research. They divided participants into five groups: one simply thought about their goals; a second group wrote their goals down; another wrote their goals and formulated action steps to reach these goals; a fourth group was asked to write down their goals, formulate action steps, and send their goals and steps to a friend; and a fifth group wrote down their goals, formulated action steps, sent their goals and steps to a friend, and created weekly reports on progress towards the goal. The test was conducted over the period of a month and a total of 149 participants were part of the study.

What do you think the research showed?

The participants in the study who simply thought about their goals scored a 4.28 on a scale of 8 in terms of achieving their goal where 0 is no progress made and 8 is goal fully accomplished. However, those in the last group who wrote down their goals, formulated action steps, sent their goals and steps to a friend, and created weekly reports on progress towards the goal scored 7.6.

Isn't this a powerful evidence?

In the past couple of years, I have been fascinated by the stories of some very successul people. What makes them succeed, and achieve extra-ordinary things in life? I used to think success comes with luck, being in the right place at the right time, and all that. In the past one year, I have enrolled myself in a mastermind group with a very well known coach, and this has given me opportunity to study some very successful people in business and social sector. Every month we get together on a Wednesday and visit a successful entrepreneur, some of who have acquired almost a celebrity status in their fields. What I find amazingly common among all these men and women is that they almost followed the same script: written goals, action plans, social commitment of their goals and follow through. They do this with such consistency that it becomes a habit, no matter if the goal is big or small.

More on this in my ebook. If you are interested to see how this can transform your life, click here and register. I will send you a free copy.

Make your New Year Resolutions Real!

New Year Resolutions: Why Some Achieve Theirs, Others Give up

Here's wishing you all a Very Happy New Year!

When we make our New Year resolutions, most of us are driven by what we think we should do (lose weight, give up smoking, find a better job, etc). Some of us have strong will power (a left brain activity), and will drag ourselves out of our bed at 6 AM to visit the gym or throw away all the cigarette packets or go on a diet. And most of us will follow these new regimes and changed lifestyle for a few weeks or months and then suddenly find dozens of reasons why we can’t continue: need to spend more time with family, my boss being horrible in office, girlfriend not liking 6 AM wake up call, the lousy English weather, Gordon Brown’s economic policy, global recession, and so on.

And then back to life as usual. Until next time.

How many times do you think that people try to achieve their new goals before they give up? The average is less than one time. Most people give up even before making the first attempt.

In his book What They Don’t Teach You In The Harvard Business School, the author describes a research conducted between 1979 and 1989 on students graduating out of the school. In 1979, the graduates of the MBA programme were asked if they had set clear, written goals for future and made plans to accomplish them. Only 3% of the graduates reported having written goals and plans, and another 13% had stated that they had goals, but not in written form. The rest 84% had no specific goals at all, apart from their focus on graduating out of the management school.

A decade later, in 1989, the same members of the class who had by then settled in their career were interviewed again. The researchers found that the 13% who had goals, albeit unwritten, were earning on average twice as much as the 84% of students who had no clear goals in 1979. But the most surprising findings was that the 3% of graduates who had clear, written goals and plans when they left Harvard were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97% of graduates who had no written goals.

What makes written goals so powerful? Read full story


Get your copy of ebook Transformational Goals: first 200 people get it free
If you are interested in getting hold of a copy of our ebook on Goal-setting which outlines step-by-step process for setting empowering goals that drive you to action, please sign up on our website: http://www.results-matter.co.uk/products.html

Result Achievers, January 2010

Here's wishing a very Happy New Year to all our readers.

This issue of our monthly newsletter carries several case stories and vital tips on setting goals and personal effectiveness. We decided on this theme of goal-setting for a particular reason. New year celebrations over, most of us have made our New Year resolutions and set our goals for the year. But how many of us will stay focused throughout the year on achiveing them? Well, if you believe statisticians, only one in ten of us! If you want proof, ask your neighbourhood gym managers and fitness trainers - come January, they can't cope with new membership applications, but by April they have difficulty keeping all the instructors busy and employed.

In What They Don't Teach You in the Harvard Business School, the author describes a study Read full story


Results Matter now has a branch in India

Starting Janaury 2010, we have a branch in India. Led by Tapas K.Datta, a former senior official with the United Nations, this branch focuses on delivering high value consulting and training services to our existing and new clients in India.Our main focus will be on providing social development consulting and leadership and management development services, working with both private and public sector.


Five Questions that can save you tens of thousands of pounds

Consultants do not come cheap for their time and expertise. Especially for small businesses and charities, the money they sometimes have to fork out for consultants' help with particular problems can cause not-so-small a hole in their budget. Parkinson's Law of work expanding to fill the time also sometimes applies to consultancies as well. Read full story