It is popular these days for people bash social media as the domain of the self-absorbed. Critics ask, “Do thousands of people really need to know that you ran out of toothpaste this morning?” Yet this reflects a very narrow understanding of social media.

As an example, let’s look at two different non-profits that are making good use of Social Media.

The first site I want to highlight is Climb Up, So Kids can Grow Up, a project of the American Foundation for Children with AIDS. I learned about this site from change.org where I was asked to participate. I’m not a climber, so I am not attending any climbathon this weekend.

However, I have been running an ad about that for the past several months. People are encouraged to ‘climb, hike, run or cycle up the structure of their choice, anywhere in the world” in an effort to “increase awareness of the pediatric AIDS pandemic and raise funds for life-saving anti-retroviral (ARV) medication, food, and medical and humanitarian supplies to children affected by HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa”.

I was invited to participate in something that I wasn’t even paying attention to. I found a way to participate that met my current needs and hopefully have added a little to their efforts.

Then, yesterday, I received a message on Utterli, formerly known as Utterz about the Red Cross’s social media efforts.

I checked out the message on Red Cross Chat and wanted to highlight it here. It encouraged people to change their avatar yesterday to a Red Cross volunteer. In some places, it is important for me to keep my avatar distinct from other avatars, so I chose to keep my avatar in my standard format, but simply added a small Red Cross on my sweater.

They also asked people to post widgets. They provide two different widgets. One is too wide, and the other one is too slow. I’ve added the slow one for the time being, but I’ll probably drop it soon. It would be good if they could provide customization options for their widgets, but I didn’t see any.

They also asked people to play PSAs and or videos of disaster responses. They have a lot of great videos, and I encourage you to check out the blog post. I selected just one:

The post ends off with a pointer to online tools which includes a link to The Red Cross’ Social Media Links page. That page includes not only the link to their Twitter stream, but also a link to the twitter stream of nearly a dozen people involved in media at the Red Cross. This is a great example of how none profits should use social media.

In both examples, the organizations used social media to invite people to participate, and provided different types of participation In both cases, I participated a little bit this time, and am more likely to participate in future events, perhaps at a deeper level in the future.