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Colin Moffett's picture

Colin Moffett

Senior Vice President, Digital Communications

Colin grew up wanting to be an architect but couldn’t shut up about politics, so he followed his mouth and moved to Washington, D.C. from the ski slopes of Vermont after college. This was around the same time nonprofits were starting to grapple with this thing called the Internet. Colin quickly focused his energy on this new medium and has worked with dozens of organizations to create digital strategies that help build their brands and fulfill their missions. At Weber Shandwick he leads the digital communications team for Social Impact and specializes in creating integrated campaigns that help clients break through the clutter and drive word-of-mouth buzz across media channels. He has managed all aspects of design and development projects as well as social media and promotion campaigns aimed at grassroots building and fundraising. He is currently the digital strategy lead for our work with Best Buy on their signature corporate social responsibility initiatives. Colin continued to distance himself from architecture with a Masters in Government from Johns Hopkins but he works to realize his first love by renovating a row house on Capitol Hill. He also looks forward to taking his young daughter to Vermont one day soon to learn how to ski.

Follow Colin on Twitter: @cmoffett


History

Member for
46 weeks 3 days
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blumes/2874510828/
Mar 22

Is Social Media Driving Social Impact? Thoughts from SxSW

Colin Moffett

It is easy to be blinded by all the shiny objects at the South by Southwest Festival. There are so many new tools and trends that it takes real effort to see real fundamental shifts in the landscape. I'm wondering if one of those shifts was inherent in Valerie Casey’s keynote when she asked the question “What if social media was about social impact?

Technology has become a great equalizer. It has torn down communication barriers, allowing people to connect in real-time across geography and social station like never before. Many Members of Congress rely less on their auto pens, and more on Twitter, to communicate with their constituents. Farmers in Africa can now share crop prices and tips with fellow farmers thousands of miles away. We have reached a level of interconnectedness few thought was possible.

But does this interconnectedness make us care more about each other and care about our collective social impact? Does the mere fact that we are directly connected to people through technology make us care more about the collective good?

Not according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Well, at least not yet. In a September '09 report Pew found that  that 37% of internet users in the 18-29 age bracket use blogs and social networks as a venue for political or civic involvement as opposed to only 17% of 30-49 year olds. So maybe these connections and this idea of inherent social impact has started to become ingrained with the so called "digital natives." 

From an organizational point of view this tells us that we we have to keep thinking of ways of making direct connections with our advocates and donors. We need to tear down the barriers that surround our organizations and connect people directly with the work and the people behind the stories. This is the power that technology provides us and the expectation that comes with it.

Mar 12

Social Impact Team @ SxSW – Reporting Live

Colin Moffett

Members of the Weber Shandwick Social Impact team are heading to the SxSW Interactive festival to listen and learn. Follow @p_massey, @cmoffett, @axelhonkrod, @acaruso and @bradleyatwork for useful tidbits and musings that organizations can use to help with their own digital strategies.
 
We’ll each be posting updates to the blog and covering as many sessions as we can. Right now we’re looking at sessions like:

Let us know if you see other panels that look interesting and we’ll check them out.
 
And if you’ll be there drop us a note and we’ll connect. You can leave a comment here or @reply us on Twitter.
 

Jan 6

5 Digital Trends for 2010 - Cheers!

Colin Moffett

Hopefully everyone is rested, relaxed and ready to tackle the new year. We wanted to start off 2010 by highlighting some digital trends to keep an eye on.  The communications landscape is still shifting at a rapid pace and every year a handful of innovations move from buzz status to become game changers. We will continue to monitor these innovations on this blog and highlight ways organizations are beginning to take advantage of the opportunities provided by these emerging technologies.

1. Location Awareness:

Your phone knows exactly where it is and what direction it’s pointing. Your computer can get pretty close —within 20 feet — just by scanning nearby WiFi networks. Location awareness will continue to be integrated into more online experiences. Twitter recently added geolocation to their API, allowing each individual tweet to be pinpointed on a map. Foursquare, the hot new Web application, is entirely based on “checking in” at various locations around your town, letting you announce your presence to friends automatically.

2. Integrated Sign-ins:

Facebook Connect, OAuth, and Google Accounts are headed for a collision course this year. Which one will come out of the fray as your single sign-in to the Internet? Innovations here will help organizations better leverage the social web across their entire online presence.

3. More Smart phones:

Google’s Nexus One could shatter the smart phone model in 2010 by letting customers buy a phone independent of a cell phone provider. Look out, iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Palm Pre.

4. Google Wave:

Just as e-mail has matured as a communications medium, Google is giving it a makeover. Google Wave, which is still operating by invite only, enables users to work in real time in shared discussions, or "waves,” that can encompass many forms of interaction: instant messaging, notes, comments, editing shared documents, and so on. Participants can move a slider to "replay" a wave to see how it took form — effectively eliminating the frustration of working on a document for an hour only to discover that the changes have already been made by someone else. 

5. The Year of the Tablet:

Amazon bet hard on the future of digital books, and despite the economy making 2009 a tough year to convince people to invest in e-books, 35 percent of book sales on Amazon were sold in Kindle format. We may see this marketplace shaken up further this year if Apple comes out with its rumored “iPad.” Apple’s device may add to the e-reader craze, and we’ll be watching closely to see what these devices mean for traditional newspapers and magazines.

Here's to a successful 2010.

Nov 9

It's a Two-Way Street

Colin Moffett

The author Dale Carnegie once wrote that "you can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people to listen." His point is that people want to hang out with friends who listen to them and engage them. The best conversations are equal amounts give and take. This is the same philosophy you should have for your social media programs. Imagine you are at a cocktail party and having a conversation about your issue or cause. You want people to leave that conversation thinking “Wow, that was a great conversation.” You don't want them leaving thinking “That person never shuts up.”

This is especially the case in the way organizations use Twitter, where retweeting (reposting the tweets of others) and @replies (communicating directly with someone else) are direct measures of how conversational you are. It is incredibly important to make sure that your organization is fully participating in the conversation. Make sure that you are retweeting what peers or followers are saying that you agree with and engage in direct dialogue with people to show that you are listening and willing to engage. The more you engage with people the more likely they are to share what you are saying with their own network of friends. This word-of-mouth messaging via retweets is the equivalent of mainstream media mentions. You can track how you are doing with retweets with tools like Tweetmeme that track the most popular tweets on Twitter. So listen and engage with others and pretty soon you'll be the life of the conversation.

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