How Nations Can Be United With Social Media (Mashable)

The United Nations is a huge organization: 193 member states and six major organs. As you can imagine, running the UN's social media networks is no walk in the park. But the international organization is incredibly active on social media, using it as a tool to spread knowledge and information about its mission, goals and accomplishments. So how does the UN, a very complex organization, manage such an active online presence?

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We sat down with Nancy Groves, social media manager at UN headquarters in New York, to find out. Groves is part of the Secretariat, the UN body charged with carrying out the day-to-day work of the organization. She maintains an active presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Tumblr and other networks.

"We're very involved in social media," says Groves, whose previous job was working as a UN librarian. "There's not much understanding of how the United Nations works out there, and we're using social media to get our message out."

"We're very involved in social media," says Groves, whose previous job was working as a UN librarian. "There's not much understanding of how the United Nations works out there, and we're using social media to get our message out."

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Educating people about the UN's work, a mystery to many, is a top priority. Groves's team often posts information and videos about the United Nations's humanitarian work and other positive efforts to keep followers feeling good about the UN.

But not all the UN's content makes you feel warm and snuggly inside. Groves posts about peacekeeping efforts, natural disasters and other emergency situations. And Groves definitely feels a "sense of urgency" when sharing info about disaster relief. The UN's social media team was very active in connecting victims and relief centers during the recent tsunami and earthquake in Japan, for example. Groves says that Twitter is very important for the UN in times of crisis, because tweets are easily shared and can go viral quickly.

"We have to cover a broad range of work," says Groves. "Famine, genocide, et cetera. We want to get the tone right."

Groves's team gets a lot of questions from followers. There's a lot of UN haters out there, too, and Groves deals with them, well, diplomatically.

"We try to respond to every question that can be answered," says Groves. "We do answer any criticism with statistics pages and informative links."

The process of posting material online can sometimes lag for two reasons.

First, the UN works in six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) and every post has to be translated into all of them for inclusion's sake. Groves often experiments with platforms popular amongst a particular language group, too. She sees her best numbers on Weibo, a Chinese site with over 300 million users, which is similar to a cross between Facebook and Twitter.

Second, all posts have to go through the UN's political review process. But Groves has a few tricks up her sleeve.

"Info can be a little slow to get out because of the translation and political review process," says Groves. "For that reason, we're often using pre-approved content. There's been one time when we didn't get approval, but people who do social tend to already have sound judgement. More than one person reads everything," says Groves.

That content could come from a more formal press release or a video that's already gone through the UN's formal review process. Groves has to be ever-mindful about language and wording, lest she inadvertently cause an international social incident. Her peer-editing process helps make sure that doesn't happen.

?The 'Be a Human Rights Defender' campaign was an excellent way to spread knowledge about rights that a lot of people aren't aware they have."

The UN's most successful social effort has been the "Be a Human Rights Defender" campaign, created to celebrate Human Rights Day. Groves's team pushed out 30 different articles on human rights, each centered around one article in the Declaration of Human Rights. People that shared the articles were titled "Human Rights Defenders." Groves said it was an excellent way to spread knowledge about rights that a lot of people aren't aware they have.

And what about coordinating the social media efforts of the UN's 17 specialized agencies, 62 Information Centers and 15 peacekeeping operations worldwide? After all, Groves is only part of the Secretariat, one of many UN bodies.

"We've got an informal working group of UN social media agents," says Groves. "We try to have meetings based in New York at least once a month. It's a positive trend for the UN as a whole, because it brings together all these different agencies and we can see how our work is inter-related. I know pretty much everyone doing social media at all the different agencies."

Groves's team is continuing to seek out new ways to use social media to spread their message. Groves says she's even looking at Pinterest, the hot new image-heavy site popular amongst the Fashion and DIY community. She's also gearing up for a major conference on sustainable development happening this summer in Rio, Brazil. For that, she's making sure she has access to Portugese translators and a presence on the social media services that Brazilians love to use.

Do you follow the United Nations on social media? If so, what do you think of their digital efforts? Let us know in the comments below.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/internet/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20120114/tc_mashable/how_nations_can_be_united_with_social_media

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