Dissemination of an innovation is time consuming but very interesting…..

It has been few weeks since we posted our first blog post… Here we are one month after the receipt of the HIF grant.

We first hired a social media consultant to implement the social media strategy for NOMAD in the coming 6 months as a part of the HIF funded dissemination campaign. The consultant has already worked with the NOMAD team before and has a good awareness of NOMAD. The consultant has compiled the implementation strategy of the social media campaign and has launched the campaign from the first week of December. The Social Media campaign of NOMAD project will ensure broadening of the scope of the project as well as to get connected to more humanitarian, development and other organizations in the field in order to expand the clientele of the project.

Now our fans can get in touch with us via face book and twitter. Our facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/HumanitarianNOMADproject?ref=ts&;fref=ts. Facebook is currently the third largest website in the world, with roughly 800 million active users connecting in 70 languages. According to comScore, this social network reached over half of the world’s available audience in October of 2011 and accounted for one in every seven minutes spent online worldwide. To maximize this engagement potential, it’s important that NOMAD project establish a presence where users spend a significant portion of their time online. In the same way that individuals create Facebook profiles for connecting with (or ‘friending’) people they know, NOMAD project will maintain a free Facebook Page for interacting with users. Once someone ‘likes’ a page, they will receive that page’s updates in their personal news feed. As these ‘fans’ interact with the page, their actions are shared across their personal networks. In this way, a Facebook page not only brings a NOMAD into the conversation, but also empowers its fans to share their voices. Since the launch of the campaign in December, we have 21 likes and 6 new fans on our page. Around 500 people on facebook have seen our new posts during this month.

The next step in the social media campaign is Twitter. We have started posting from the first week of December, regular tweets on the NOMAD twitter account and spreading the knowledge about NOMAD amongst our followers. We plan to contact people who have worked on NOMAD pilot projects and obtain quotes, pictures, anecdotes and other stories about working with NOMAD team members and mobile data collection solutions. These will be post on our website, tweeter, and Facebook page.

We have also been able to start the process of recruiting a web master in order to Improve the Online Selection Assistant Nomad tool database and to improve the design of the NOMAD website. The consultant will be recruited soon.

In December, the NOMAD project was presented at the UN International Crowdsource Mapping Expert Meeting. This has been implemented as an open network of providers of space-based solutions to support disaster management activities. http://un-spider.org/about

In our next blog post, we will have more information regarding the workshop we plan to organize on order to disseminate more information about the NOMAD project among possible stakeholders.

So stay tuned to read more developments from our side soon.. We all at NOMAD wish our reader a very prosperous year 2013....

Luvini Ranasinghe

NOMAD

Social Media Consultant