I sat down last night to pull a few stats together and to reflect on the emotions of the last 10 days. Of course I’m talking about the phenomenon that has become Baked Relief (or #bakedrelief if you are following on twitter).

My personal involvement began on Tuesday 11 January 2011 when my hubby called at 9am to say his office was being evacuated in preparation of the floods that were due to hit Brisbane from the following day. I popped along to the shops to stock up on a few essentials – extra milk, more fruit and veg, and some ingredients to bake a couple of chocolate cakes, sausage rolls and a few sandwiches to help feed some of the volunteers that I knew would be helping with preparations to stem the flow of the rising river.

Wednesday 12 January 2011 – hubby {Shaun Leck} popped along to help fill sandbags to fill sandbags at our local Council Depot, and landed his first media appearance – an interview in the Age.

Since then Baked Relief has exploded. My friend Danielle first used the twitter hashtag #bakedrelief on Tuesday 11 January and blogged about it on http://digella.blogspot.com. Offers of help and baking have come flooding in {couldn’t resist that one }.

Baked Relief is now providing food to thousands of people, including those that were flood affected; Volunteering QLD; the SES; QLD Police, Fire & Ambulance workers; the military helping clean up; and so many others who are helping with the massive clean up.

To me Baked Relief symbolises what can happen when the power of social media comes into play. Primarily due to the reach and influence of twitter, facebook and blogs, support has been generated, sponsors have come forward, money has been donated and people have been fed. Would this have happened without social media? Yes, of course it would have. Would it have happened with the same speed and volume, now that’s highly unlikely.

Baked Relief quickly crossed over from social media to mainstream media, with mainstream media picking up the story and first mentioning Baked Relief on Sunday 16 January 2011. This generated an increased number of people getting involved {and a HUGE increase in emails in my in-box as people wanted to know HOW they could help}.

The Baked Relief website was launched on Monday 17 January and had just under 2,500 hits in its first 12 hours.

I also launched the Adopt-a-family program on my food blog, The Cook’s Notebook, on Monday 17 January and we have had nearly 300 families already volunteer to help feed a flood affected family for possibly up to a year! We have now partnered with Flood Aid to coordinate this program.

A few stats (as of Thursday 20 January) and other interesting things about Baked Relief:

• Baked Relief has had significant national media coverage with 5 print articles and 14 interviews on radio and television, including the high rating national breakfast TV show, The Today Show (you can watch us at http://news.ninemsn.com.au/video.aspx?videoid=82710eac-1c30-4790-bcb5-45170616ef55)
• Countless blog mentions and web-posts
• 4,230 mentions on Google when you search on #bakedrelief
• Thousands of facebook and twitter mentions
• Reached #2 in trending hashtags in Australia on Tuesday 18 January (on previous days was #3, #4, #5
• While we haven’t been able to effectively measure how many people are baking for Baked Relief but we assume it’s at least 1,000 in South East Queensland (not just Brisbane). It’s grown too organically for us to count!
• People are driving from over 2 hours away to deliver food, and we know of at least one group (Funky Pies) who drove up from Sydney (about 1,000km and 12 hour drive) to deliver their pies to people working at Volunteering Queensland, Queensland Police and an evacuation centre.

Baked Relief is changing the way people are using social media – and in particular twitter. Yesterday I tweeted “I wonder how many people have signed up to twitter just because of #bakedrelief”. About 20 people replied saying that they had either joined twitter SOLELY because of Baked Relief or they joined ages ago and are now only actually using it actively because of Baked Relief. WOW.

Yesterday I also tweeted social media guru David Meerman Scott to alert him to the real-time communication that led to such a massive response for Baked Relief. When he messaged me back to say he’d love to blog about it I danced around the car park I was in at the time! My excitement was off the scale! Read David’s blog. And THANK YOU David!! I hope I can buy you a beer when you are in Brisbane in April.

For more information on Baked Relief or how you can contribute go to www.bakedrelief.org.

I thought it would be fitting for my first blog post to be about goals vs New Year’s Resolutions. Particularly as I have had a goal of getting this new website written and live for about 6 months. I figured that it would be a good goal to kick for the start of the year! And now I have. Phew!

Which brings me to my point. Do you have goals or do you make resolutions? Such as the New Year Resolution? In my experience, goals are often achieved whereas resolutions tend to fall by the wayside by about the 10th of January. If not earlier.

So in 2010 I have decided not to make any NY resolutions (yes, big shock horror to those who know me ). However I have made a list of goals – that I am aiming to achieve by the end of 2010. These include the usual lose weight, do more exercise, eat more fruit and veggies, save money, as well as a few less usual – get more culture into my life, do more speaking engagements, gain a few more long term clients, plan holidays and long weekends.

To achieve these, every month my partner and I sit down together and make a series of “mini-goals” that will help us achieve our bigger picture goals. So, in the spirit of trying to be accountable to myself and anyone who reads this, my January goals are:

• lose weight – 4kg would be good
• do 1 hour of exercise a day (not achieved every day, but have done at least 30 minutes a day so far)
• relaunch my website by the end of January (big tick)
• make a new recipe once a week at least (done! and Shaun is very happy about this one!)
• read two non-fiction books – currently reading Going Rogue by Sarah Palin, next on the list is either Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith or Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk
• go to two networking functions

So now you know mine, I would love you to share your goals for January and 2010 – and how you are going with achieving them.