The Wired Nonprofit 2012

Reflecting Forward and Backward

howardgr — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:33:46 -0400

We recently had Eli Pariser talk about The Filter Bubble, and the challenge of having technology hide information from us online. This Sunday’s NY Times brought Sherry Terkel, talking about “The Flight from Conversation,” where she laments the ability for always-on connectivity to become a substitute for deep, meaningful, interactive, in-person conversations.

In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens.

While I’m very familiar with that scene, I don’t consider the ability to tune out distractions and focus with some music a total conversation stopper. And I won’t deny that I enjoy the “sips,” as she calls them, of conversational interaction on the various social networks. But in co-Teaching with Tom and Marcia, and in co-creating this class with all of you, I have experienced some fantastic conversations.

Doc Searls said “We Are All Authors of Each Other,” in which he states:

Informing is not the same as delivering information. Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you.

I believe we as a teaching team have helped “form” you, in some way, towards thinking about the use of online and digital technologies to get at that human, two-way communications. I state this because I have read papers from most of you, and have noticed the growth from your initial drafts and your outlined thoughts towards serious strategic thinking.

In some cases, I’m seeing the founding or re-formation of organizations intended to help groups in society to connect, learn, communicate, support and share with each other. The medium in this case actually enables the message. If distance, illness, or social standing blocks communication, the plans you have created routes around those blocks and creates new paths to explore. In other cases, I’m seeing clarity and new communications modes for organizations that need the help to connect, fundraise, and raise awareness.

Reading your plans makes me excited for a more connection-rich future.

Privacy Thoughts

jhdavenport — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:45:00 -0400

I thought this comic was amusing, but also rang true. While there are some real privacy concerns, I think we often are not as careful as we should be online. I have heard people complain about privacy concerns, yet they openly share personal information on their personal social media sites. If we are so concerned about privacy, shouldn’t we be more careful? We click through agreements without reading them all the way through, and agree to let applications share our information without even really thinking about it. Considering everything published on Facebook is searchable, many people are not as careful as they should be, especially if they do not want their posts or information to be found.

So do nonprofits fall into the same traps? They strive for transparency, as we’ve learned, but does this transparency get them into trouble, or are they smarter about what they agree to and share?

Jenny

Getting down to the wire

howardgr — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:40:00 -0400

We’re nearing the end of classes and the time when things are due. So I’m going to go “off plan” and instead of previewing material from the next class, I’ll just share a few articles that may actually help you with your final papers.

We don’t really emphasize search marketing as part of class. However, as anyone who has looked at a typical site’s analytics will tell you, many, many people find you because of search. So, learning about how social media affects search results is a good idea.

Digiday reports:

Natural search results are very much intertwined with social media. Social media is teaching people to interpret and filter their inputs based on their social network. People trust each other more than they trust branded content. The opportunity for brands lies in cultivating loyal customers so they then go on to market the brand to their friends.

You can read about “Social’s Hidden Power: Search Rankings” for more. While we’re at it, why not use “Social Media to Test Email Subject Lines?” Seems like a great use of social to see what your audience responds to.

Additionally, we’ve discussed LinkedIn but it often doesn’t rise to the level of ‘must engage in’ when we discuss strategy in class. Perhaps that’s why it’s called “The Forgotten Social Network” in this article. Not only can you run ads that target top executives - you can also make sure your company updates are targeted to specific people. Maybe cause marketing efforts are targeted to top people in companies? Get creative.

Enjoy your week off, and don’t forget to attend the panel tomorrow night if you can.

- Howard Greenstein

Wrangle Your Privacy Settings:...

palomacmedina — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:41:35 -0400

Wrangle Your Privacy Settings: http://mypermissions.org/

Speaking on privacy, I found this handy page to quickly see what SM sites have permission to do with my info.

Honestly it’s overwhelming, just going through my facebook privacy settings (now that I have a handy link that takes me right to the page) is taking me awhile, but it feels like time well spent.

Half of the sites that had permission to access my FB I’d never heard of. Half. Roughly a third I’d heard of but didn’t realize somehow got linked to my FB account. And roughly half had permission to post content on my behalf.

What I wonder:

1. Are companies like FB, which profit from these permissions being left on, developing better ways to make this kind of “privacy empowerment” harder to accomplish for the everyday person?

2. What about the ethically-conscious apps — like Change.org? Are any of these taking ethical stands (and publicizing these) about being more conscious of how they’re tapping into our data? I know I would be more like to “like” or support a cause if they up-front stated what their default SM privacy settings were. I was especially creeped out by some nonprofit-related apps that were “Accessing my data anytime” (even when I’m not interacting with the application). No thanks!

Anyone else used this type of “clean up” service?

Paloma

Knocking Down the Silos

howardgr — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:04:50 -0400

Social Media have triggered new collaborations, across organizations and disciplines. We’ve seen that clearly from our work in class over the past 10 or so weeks. A practitioner doesn’t just have to know fundraising or development in a traditional sense (though it is critical to understand the field as a whole), they have to know how to get the crowd involved as well.

As shown in the paper I published with Professor Watson last year, Wired Workforce, Networked CSR - Employee Involvement in the Age of Social Media , companies aren’t just looking at giving from a philanthropy perspective either. Companies like Pepsi have created entire marketing initiatives to engage their customers on a different level related to community and cause involvement, which also might resonate with people who drink carbonated beverages. Kaiser Permanente isn’t just thinking about health insurance and doctor bills for sick people, they’ve created a blog and Facebook presence to encourage healthly lifestyles and health information sharing.

Nonprofits like Donors Choose and Changing the Present redefine giving and create huge windows of transparency between donors and recipients that set a bar for organizations everywhere to consider.

Cause Marketing becomes confusing when you look at products that are also causes, like Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap (from this month’s Inc. Magazine.)

As you create your final papers and videos, give a thought to Cause Marketing efforts, and think about whether getting a brand or company involved with your efforts is worth thinking about.

While we have no class session on the 18th, don’t forget about the Evening with Futurist Andrew Zolli.

#wnpNYU Links: Games and Case Studies

tomwatson — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:34:00 -0400

“Gamification” was the theme of last week’s class and here are some (slightly belated!) links to relevant material. I came across this fabulous story in upstate Times Herald-Record courtesy of blogger Lance Mannion - an onlight flight simulator tool based on a game that will allow researchers to crowdsource the right of Amelia Earhart’s ill-fated 1937 flight.

“Everybody was looking in the same place, and no one had found her,” Blair said.

What if, Blair wondered, instead of booking passage on one of those search efforts (typical fare: $50,000), he could instead book passage on a virtual duplicate of Earhart’s plane?

Why couldn’t he duplicate her flight path and make his own investigation?

Blair calls the answer to those questions The Electra Project. With a thoroughness that Earhart herself would have benefitted from, he and a crew of investors and researchers have meticulously re-created the Lockheed Electra L10E “Special,” the bimotor monoplane that was supposed to carry Earhart across the Pacific but instead became her tomb.

Blair is putting the final touches on the program, which runs on a popular flight simulator program called X-Plane.

After two years of intensive research and costs of $50,000, it’s scheduled for public release in June — just before the 75th anniversary of Earhart’s disappearance.

We also heard from Suzanne Seggerman, an award-winning activist and co-founder and former President of Games for Change (G4C), a leading global advocate for social impact games. Suzanne gave a fantastic overview of interactive games that engage users with causes and movements. One key point she made that I think require emphasis: social change games are still relatively new - we’re in the 1950s of the television development. G4C is a real nexus for social change game theory and here’s a video interview they did with author Jane McGonigal about her book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World:

Professor Greenstein took us through the famed case study of Canadian musician Dave Carroll and his United Breaks Guitars campaign. Sometimes things go wrong. Mistakes are made. Failures happen. And that’s part of why this study of social media - still so early in its development - is fascinating. Here’s a piece that Professor Stepanek wrote two years ago for the Stanford Social Innovation Review that really takes on this idea of failure with a couple of very prominent examples. And Prof. Greenstein had a piece in Inc. about TV builder Bob Vila’s lessons learned about digital media that shows the ups and downs that even a well-known voice finds online. And sometimes what’s lacking in the real social network: this past week, activists tried to put pressure on Augusta National to name its first female member, in a year when the IBM CEO - traditionally granted membership - is a women. Yet the Masters tournament went on with only a smattering of op-ed pieces. No real pressure - and as I wrote in Forbes, I think it’s because that network was clearly absent.

- Prof. Watson

Privacy (Still) Matters

marciastepanek — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 16:31:00 -0400

This Wednesday, we’ll be talking about a number of Information Age challenges to civil liberties. Your optional reading this week (the first two chapters of Helen Nissenbaum’s Privacy in Context) focuses on how the “social” Internet has forced society to reexamine its definitions of privacy and its expectations for it.

Make no mistake: the privacy debate is hotter (and louder) than ever. But what people really care about today when they complain that their privacy has been violated is not so much that their personal information has been shared but that it’s been shared inappropriately.

According to Nissenbaum, today’s privacy policies are not nuanced enough; we have tended to adopt “one size fits all” protections that either go too far by ignoring these distinctions or fail to go far enough. Nissenbaum says information ought to be distributed and protected according to social context: what’s appropriate in the context of a workplace, or a medical clinic, or a social network, or a school, or among family and friends.

I interviewed Nissenbaum for PopTech (I write occasionally for the community) when her book first came out in 2010. Here’s a link to that interview, which hits on the high notes of her position on privacy — a ground-breaking framework for thinking more constructively about the issue, one that has since been adopted by information technologists working at the core of social media technologies today.

What do you think of her position?

— Professor Stepanek

(Photograph: Helen Nissenbaum, NYU Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication & Computer Science)

What do we really know?

travismichaelflores — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 02:16:00 -0400

I am sitting in my BEAUTIFUL NEW APARTMENT ;) As I’m sitting here, did I mention it’s a beautiful apartment, anyway, as I am sitting here I’m starting to think how much we really know about social media. There is such a mass amount of information stored within these databases that we can’t possibly know how much of that being contained or saved. Furthermore, the fact that information is being given by us whether we know it or not. Every time we click on something to accept whatever it might be, what is recorded in that moment, if anything? What can be traced back to the exact computer where you sat last week while on facebook? It’s starting to really intrigue me to think about this sort of stuff, but it really worries me too.

For example… when we die, not to be vulgar but it’s going to happen to all of us at some point, what happens to everything we have stored on the Internet? I have had friends that have passed on. It’s been over a year for one of them and their facebook is still active and still receiving information as if she were still alive and available to check it.

Who controls this? Does anyone?

Travis

Don't give in to the Dark Side

howardgr — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 11:23:00 -0400

Do we really know the power of the dark side?

Next week’s class is about the challenges, failures and public relations nightmares that come with being online. Some organizations are duly chastised, and turn their procedures and direction around, as we heard from the Red Cross earlier in the semester.

Some situations, like the Susan G. Komen and Planned Parenthood conflict earlier this year, show organizations that are not prepared for a public backlash. They literally pull a play from the ostrich playbook, hoping by hiding their own heads in the sand, no one will look at them.

And yet, sometimes, the folks that are “looking good” in the public eye have a karmic boomerang. Witness this morning’s article stating that Planned Parenthood refused a $500,000 donation from humorist Tucker Max, since they were afraid it would turn off other donors. Max is famous for writing about his conquests of women, once saying - “Due to the potent combination of my sexual recklessness and the slutty nature of some of the girls I have slept with, I have accumulated enough stories and anecdotes about abortion that they could name a Planned Parenthood clinic after me.” Humor or disgusting person- you decide based on your own sensitivities. In fact, last year, a major conservative campaign was started around this specific quote. See the Live Action blog or google “Tucker Max Planned Parenthood”. So the fact that Planned Parenthood hasn’t taken his money for just such a donation is potentially an interesting challenge.

Having been involved with a non-profit that didn’t take money from a controversial figure, I’m aware these kinds of events can come under scrutiny from the government as well as supporter or detractors.

Coming up in our class next week, we’ll not only discuss the dark side of public relations, but also the Filter Bubble, with the author of that book, Eli Pariser. The basic premise of the Filter Bubble is that the net “hides” things from us. The more we get news from friends via social networks, and the more search engines give us things based on our preferences, the less we see about opposing points of view or other possible outcomes or scenarios, and the more we talk to our own echo chamber.

On the positive side this morning, we find that Online Gifts have grown 16% this year. The article notes”…some cause related, social media savvy non-profits are now raking in as much as 25% of their small donations on line.” So, keep working on those plans!

Howard Greenstein

Many-to-Many

marciastepanek — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:48:00 -0400

So far this term, we’ve talked quite a bit in class about engagement — and how individuals can communicate with many people quickly using social media. We’ve also talked about the Occupy movement, Kony2012, the Komen backlash and other examples where social media have been used to facilitate rapid, group-to-group communication and engagement.

George Weiner, the CTO of DoSomething.org and our guest last week, talked about this type of “many-to-many” communication in his talk about “leaderless movements” — and cited a group of new and existing social media tools that some causes are using to help “spread the word” quickly, many-to-many.

Here are a few he mentioned, and a few he did not:

Group Me: A group messaging app that lets you start groups with the people already in your contact lists. When you send a message, everyone instantly receives it.

Celly: A free group text messaging service for schools and communities. Group chat, create a group poll, and curate group content using sms text messaging.

Textmarks: A mobile marketing provider of group mobile alerts and a group text messaging platform for organizing group gatherings on the fly.

Vibe Messaging - This is a smartphone app for anonymous broadcast messaging, used by Occupy Wall Street to communicate with people without necessarily knowing them. “SMS is what email was in 2000,” Weiner says.

Weiner also says he’s a big fan of Meetup groups, and we are, too. Across the country, there are currently 752 nonprofit Meetup groups comprising a total of 103,925 members, 324 cities and 20 countries. Here are a few Meetups in the NYC area that nonprofits are using to convene cause-related groups and also to build communities of practice:

New York City Volunteer Club, the largest NY volunteer group on Meetup

NYC Non-Profit Meetup Club (NYCNP)

Be Social Change New York

Goodnik

Tech4Good / 501TechNYC

Party4aCause

And here are some social media Meetup groups to watch:

Hacks/Hackers - New York

#140Conf: The State of Now

New York Social Media Meetup

And don’t forget Professor’s Greenstein’s Social Media Club, http://socialmediaclub.org/chapter/new-york-ny

Got any further Clubs, Meetups or ‘many-to-many’ social media tools to share? Let us hear from you!

— Professor Stepanek

#wnpNYU Thursday Links: Social Capital, Hard at Work

tomwatson — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:43:00 -0400

The semester’s final outside speaker is slated to Mari Kuraishi, co-founder of the excellent GlobalGiving social enterprise, with a decade’s experience in how social media (though we didn’t call it that then) can power giving and involvement. I wrote my column for Forbes this week on Mari’s trip to Japan a year after the tsunami and the evolution of GlobalGiving’s model. Here’s the bit with my personal take:

I know the extra mile GlobalGiving travels to both vet and follow-up with its nonprofit partners – largely because GlobalGiving stays in touch through email, video, social media to let me know how things are going. And while the large-scale relief efforts certainly deserve support in times of crisis, my dollars instinctively follow the path of smaller scale enterprises and organizations where I know Kuraishi and her team build real relationships, study the data, and invest philanthropic resources where they’re needed. This is social capital hard at work.

GlobalGiving has reached sustainability after 10 long years of hard work, trial and error, and community-building. Our speaker this week was the insightful George Weiner, CTO of DoSomething, an organization that - get this - has actually been around since 1993. Now to be fair, it’s been more recently jump-started after a period of inactivity by Nancy Lublin and her to-notch team, but I also think that like GlobalGiving, DoSomething.org is a prime example of a non-overnight success in the online social activism space (which I chronicled in my 2008 book CauseWired). Here’s George, giving his justly famous five-word acceptance speech at the Webby Awards:

Another long-term online social venture that has seen rapid growth of late is Change.org, the online activism and petition platform - you may have signed a Trayvon Martin petition, or a Susan G. Komen petition, or a Rush Limbaugh petition…all in the last month or so. Its founder Ben Rattray has been nominated to be included in Time magazine’s Time 100 poll of “leaders, artists, innovators, icons and heroes.” The skinny:

Rattray told TIME he’d rather Change.org win a Nobel Peace Prize than have a big-ticket IPO. The site is a platform that allows ordinary folks to launch petitions against inequity and gather support from all over the world. With nearly 10 million members, it packs a big punch: witness the incredible success of the Trayvon Martin petition, which attracted nearly 2 million signatures.

Finally, from the Harvard Business Review blog network, a discussion by Tom Davenport on the importance of “small data” in understanding what’s happening in an organization:

…you don’t need big data, or even big support from senior management, to foment your own revolution in organizational decision-making. With small data to be found everywhere, there is no excuse not to improve your own judgment calls.

Tom Watson

Gamification for good - a divisive topic

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:24:29 -0400

Jane McGonigal is a dynamite presenter and her PhD thesis that gaming can make the world a better place is provocative. I read through comments posted in response to her presentation and found that “addiction” to gaming is a major concern, particularly for teenagers. This emotional response to McGonigal’s theories are distracting from her valid findings. Addiction to substances (alcohol, food) or activities (shopping, gaming) is complicated; substances/ activities are symptoms of the problem (disease) not the cause. McGonigal’s theories represent a paradigm shift in how we think about gaming, behavior change, and transferable skills. Resistance to this is natural and the focus on addiction could be part of the hesitancy to change our thinking about gaming and world betterment.

What I think is the most interesting point McGonigal makes, is that gaming changes behavior and thinking. For people to feel or belive that they can solve problems and ‘go to the next level’ is exactly what is needed in approaching social issues.

George Weiner, CTO of dosomething.org was a presenter at this years SXSW on the “Can Gaming Make the World a Better Place?” His views, which can be heard in Ryan Stewart’s blog are that social problems are overwhelming for teenagers and that solutions need to be broken down into manageable chunks. McGonigal’s theory is that gaming empowers young people; game levels are designed to be mastered before moving onto harder and more complicated scenarios using insights and skills gained from working through the previous level. This is also a pragmatic approach to solving world problems. Weiner also points out that gaming is essentially built on intrinsic rewards, which matches research that people are motivated intrinsically to make the world a better place.

Gabe Zichermann, gamification thought leader, in an interview with Adele Peters in 2011, has a view similar to McGonigal, defining gamification as “the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems.” Games are not new in developing this engagement. The military uses gaming as part of their training. Weiner gives the example of the Prius dashboard designed to challenge drivers to drive in ways that reduce environmental impact. Another example of gaming and education is the UN World Food program’s Grain of Rice which is about core curriculm, not world hunger.

Given the huge amount of hours and resources invested in gaming, by the industry and the players, McGonigal’s theories of behaviour and thinking resulting from gaming need to be considered creatively and rationally as to how they can be transferred to challenging the systems that lead to many of the US and the world’s social, economic, environmental, and cultural problems.

Katherine Crawford-Gray

My Online Community Participation

marciastepanek — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:24:00 -0400

I am a very active member on Facebook. It enables me to keep in touch with my family and friends on both coasts and allows me to network in a variety of ways. When I was still acting, I was able to make lots of acting connections through facebook and sometimes even got jobs referred to me that way. I am still in close contact with my actor friends via facebook. I suppose when I decide to start performing again, this network that I have built will prove very handy. I believe I am facebook friends with good number of the African American actors and film makers in New York. It’s a relatively small community, so staying active among these participants is important.

I also network for grantwriting via facebook. Every time I successfully raise money for an organization, I post about it. When I post about it, I get more inquiries and more potential clients.

I also manage the Facebook page for The Fabulous Report. That has proven difficult. I really am not a fashionista…I just write about it. :-) So networking on behalf of the Fabulous Report has proven a slow process of acquiring “likes.”

I think Facebook is a great tool for the JDRC, particularly with sharing videos, pictures, and testimonials of their work. Disaster response is well conveyed in visuals. Showing a picture of a house that has been completely destroyed is very powerful. And on Facebook, people can comment about them and share them.

— Melanie

TED Video

gourmetbites — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 15:04:56 -0400

Jane McGonigal’s ability to incorporate comedy with reality in addressing pressing universal issues through gaming is very engaging. She presents the power and potential that gamers have to create “epic” social change. These gamers believe that they are capable of achieving problems in the virtual world vs. the real world. Perhaps this is because in the real world people are faced with the fear of criticism and obstacles that may prevent them from achieving social good, such as lack of financial and social support. Or is it that this new generation of gamers lacks the ability or desire to engage in real-life social action because they perceive online social action is to be more powerful and impactful. For example, do the gamers view having 300 friends on Facebook as more meaningful than having 10 friends in real life.

What I also found interesting about the TED video was Jane’s appeal to transition the gamers desire to make social change from the virtual world to real life. This objective is similar to how we are trying to teach our organizations how to transition their social media goals into real world action.

~ Sara

FB vs Pinterest

palomacmedina — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:45:00 -0400

There are now two online platforms I take part in, and both for very different reasons.

Facebook serves three key purposes for me — 1) to feel connected with distant friends and family members - almost as connected as if I lived nearby, 2) to send messages to friends who’s phone number or email addresses I never acquired or lost track of and 3) to share photos and life updates of my own with close friends. Reason #3 is the way I use it most. It’s very much more of a one-way street than one would expect with FB. I rarely browse other people’s profiles, I rarely look at the news feed, I rarely request new friend connections and more and more I rarely accept new friend requests unless I know people very well. I have email alerts sent to my spam email account so I never get any prompt to check FB. I like it this way. I never found it a huge time-suck but still like to limit my use of it to post my own photos and get and receive messages from people close to me who are far away. All in all I check facebook about once every other week and spend about 15 minutes on it, mostly uploading and tagging photos.

Pinterest is the second online community I partake in, and this feels a lot more of a two-way street. I use pinterest as a mental brake. I find the layout and interface beautifully designed and relaxing to browse through. The first few weeks I was exploring it I spent more than an hour on it - and loved every second of it. I browse it for both random and specific inspiration ideas and research content. I repin like crazy and love the organizing aspect of it. I check who’s following me and thoroughly browse their boards. This level of interaction is more thorough than any exploring I do on FB and I believe can entirely be attributed to it’s clean, aesthetically-inclined layout and focus on imagery rather than text. I appreciate that Pinterest both inspires and relaxes me and doesn’t barrage me with multiple types of interaction requests. All alerts are sent to my spam email account and when I login there is one simple area on the left that gives me interaction updates but outside of that, I don’t have to manage these interactions (unlike friend requests, messages, tag requests, etc on FB). In general Pinterest makes the internet exciting again and manageable, all without feeling like it’s creeping into my private life.

I am excited to keep exploring Pinterest and expect to see a decrease in my usage of FB usage.

Paloma Medina

Influences by Addiction

travismichaelflores — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:53:09 -0400

Watching the TED video in which Jane McGonigal discusses the possibility of video gaming solving real-world problems was interesting… to say the least. I have to say that I listened to what was said, but I have a very strong stance on this whole topic relating to video games and the real-world.

A few years ago, I wrote a 25 page dissertation on the deadly influences by addiction of video gaming. The amount of information and research that has been conducted to prove the theory of video game violence and it’s influences is astounding. There have even been links to school shootings to certain video games that were played by the “shooters”. Now, I am certainly not saying that all video gaming and all video gammers are going to take negativity from a video game and apply it in real life, but I am saying that I would not look to video games to solve real-world problems. The problem with video games right now is the very fact that people do have a sense of power within the game. A hero is born when an avatar can be created. I would not say this is a good thing whatsoever. Speaking in very basic terms, how can games that depict killing to achieve a goal be used to achieve real goals?

Travis

My face in someone's book

travismichaelflores — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:41:44 -0400

The idea of someone being able to quickly view an entire life within a few minutes seems crazy, but with the new timeline feature on Facebook it has become possible. I have been a Facebook member since 2009, which in the grand scheme of things is not long at all consider the amount of time and information that Facebook has acquired since its beginnings. After joining Facebook, I can remember that I did not find it useful because I was one of the many believers of Myspace. I never pictured my life without logging into my Myspace account, but now I couldn’t even tell you what Myspace looked or looks like.

An interesting side note is that even when typing on Tumblr right now, certain words are autocorrected to be capitalized. Facebook being one of them, Myspace not being recognized. I am capitalizing it myself.

Facebook is a great addition to my organization. It allows people to communicate and have discussions regarding the mission and the future goals of the projects that we take on. Personally, I think Facebook is useful for anyone that is looking for a social relationship, but may not be the best at communication in crowds, gatherings, night life etc. I use Facebook for family/friends connectivity.

Travis

Found Causes

hiphopometry — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:11:59 -0400

Social media gives people a chance to assert their individualism and accentuate the idiosyncratic in their personality, interests and values. This seems like it could be at odds with the conventional idea of building a community of action, which can demand subordinating the individual to the collective campaign. Traditional political alliance might have involved commitment to a single party or ideology and attempting to construct a comprehensive coherent program based on principles and values which everybody is supposed to agree upon. Collective strength is presumed to depend upon everybody repeating the same vision. In contrast the notion of a ‘cause’ is not about articulating a systematic program which people are supposed to subscribe to wholly. Rather it might suggest a more flexible approach, to encourage multiple readings and the engagement of an idea which can be important to different people in different ways. Sometimes causes arising sporadically. They can be politicized or consensualized to a greater or lesser extent.

In class Geoff Livingston pointed out that people will join a group if they perceive it to be aligned with their own interests. He emphasized the importance of tangents and flexibility in developing a network. Yet, as Tom points out in CauseWired, though the world ‘is incredibly individualistic…leadership is still an operative quality, and a real change-maker’. People still follow other people. They are bound to – because they are connected. Thus an idea can be passed along the ‘long tail’ like a ripple through a snake. Further this long tail might come in contact with other tails and end up rattling the whole bag of snakes.

The cause-wired creature is still in still in its relative infancy. It may be that new conventions of political discourse will emerge. It may be that the chaotic nature of the global economy and environment renders any sort of systematic political theorizing as naive and irrelevant.

Yet I have some concern about whether the structure and velocity of interaction through social media allows the scope and subtlety of analysis, and the space for constructing complex arguments which authentic social change would seemingly demand. I was alarmed by the simplistic causal chain asserted by the creators of KONY2012, and would probably be even more alarmed if a Facebook campaign actually could so easily lead to the deployment of troops in Uganda.

It is also important to be realistic about the extent to which ‘virtual’ campaigns can ever really be sufficient to challenge the ‘facts on the ground’ of entrenched structures of power. Though Facebook may have driven the conversation of the Egyptian revolution, it was the physical gathering of the masses, defying the actual violence of police and state that finally brought about change. As Tom reminds us (albeit regarding a more modest endeavour), ‘moving from online to in-person cement[s] the cause’.

[Joel]

Tweeting For a Better World

gourmetbites — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:50:28 -0400

Tweeting For a Better World: Essentials of Social Media Strategy for Smaller Nonprofits

This is a helpful PDF I came across from a Bridgespan email.

“Recognizing the need to build the social media capacity of nonprofits, the Rita Allen Foundation began a pilot project last spring to help six grantees plan effective social media strategies. This report summarizes the findings of that project and provides practical insight into how these organizations plan to use social media to advance their missions,” By Sivan Nemovicher, Elizabeth Good Christopherson, Jill Nagle, and Jonathan Kartt

http://www.bridgespan.org/tweeting-for-a-better-world.aspx

~Sara

Participating Versus Leading

howardgr — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:11:00 -0400

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,” is a common phrase that may date back to the 12th century (according to the Phrase Finder.) In that same way, you can lead a community, but they won’t always follow you. Leadership in the online world is often much more of a negotiated set of rules, norms and contributions, with consensus building, a dose of public recognition and potential for shame as carrot and stick (to keep with our horse analogy).

In “Managers Need to Up Their Game with Social Media,” on a Harvard Business Review blog, Anthony J. Bradley, group vice president, Gartner Research, and Mark P. McDonald, group vice president and Gartner Fellow, Gartner Executive Programs discuss the challenges of implementing Social Media in large enterprises. They talk about water and horse leading perfectly, saying:

Relinquishing control to create space for collaboration challenges managers who rely on their authority, experience, and positional power to achieve results. And managers who exercise their authority over a collaborative community will defeat the purpose of social media-based collaboration and turn energetic and innovative communities into just another form of corporate task force.

We know this is the case from many of our examples this semester. No one coerced or used positional power to get people to sign petitions about Komen or Kony2012 or Occupy. Instead, as Bradley and McDonald note, online community is about guiding people, showing the water, the potential and showing the solution to thirst.

They state:

Participation, purpose, and performance represent the goals for guiding management and the requirements for effective managers/sponsors in mass collaboration. However, it takes a particular type of manager and management team to foster the type of mass collaboration that taps into the collective genius of your customers and employees.

And, just like in a great online community, a comment in that post yielded another great post reference. Greg Lowe of Yammer posted about the need to include Middle Managers in the creation of company social networks as a key to success of any build out. We can learn from his advice about focusing on behavior and opportunities and not tools when we “sell” the use of social into organizations we work with. There are legitimate fears, concerns, and barriers to change that we can’t bulldoze to make things “the social way” from the start. Those same concerns come up when we create networks of friends to support causes in the world.

I’d love your feedback on those pieces.

Also, in anticipation of next week, Fast Company has an interview with Jane McGonigal that is a great, 6 minute video to watch.

— Howard