I wasn’t going to put anything up on here, but a very gracious e-mail from Greg Swann encouraged me to lay out my experiences over the last 24 hours and how we can use social media not only to further our businesses but more importantly in dark times like this, we can use them to do good for those who are much less fortunate than us.
For the last 22 hours and 15 minutes (with the exception of a 2 1/2 hour nap around 4:00 this morning,) I’ve been using social media to help in Haiti. Let me explain:
- As many of you know, my wife and I adopted our two youngest children from Haiti in the summer of 2004. We’ve remained very involved with the orphanage that we adopted them from, God’s Littlest Angels, which is in Petionville Haiti.
- I’ve been on the board for the orphanage since 2006 and every year since 2003 (with the exception of 2005), at least one of our family has been back down there on a mission trip to help out. My 20 year old has decided to devote her life to third world medical missions, almost certainly in Haiti.
- Throughout those experiences, I’ve developed a pretty extensive network of people around, literally, the world who have connections to Haiti. Most of those are Facebook Friends.
- In addition to that, I’ve developed a pretty extensive network of online friends in the real estate and lending communities literally all across the country. If you consider Seattle to Miami to be all across the country, I think I’ve got it covered.
Yesterday, those two worlds met and it’s been truly a mindblowing experience. Let me explain:
- At 5:15 pm, I got a tweet across tweetdeck that was from @latimes (I use that as one of my news sources). It talked about a massive earthquake in Haiti, near Port Au Prince.
- I immediately hopped on AIM and talked to God’s Littlest Angels stateside coordinator and confirmed that the orphanage was affected but that the damage appeared minor and everyone was safe.
- I then spent the next several hours e-mailing, facebooking, twittering and IM’ng with people all Read more