Social Media
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Can Silicon Valley and NPR Save the News?
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Twitter's Million Dollar Gift
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From Brilliant Blog to Business Opportunity
Top #SocEnt's and Twitter Power Tools
Published October 13, 2009 @ 11:32AM PT
Austin, TX based social innovator Martin Montero (@montero) is a great source of content about social entrepreneurship and innovation. He's put together a new list of suggested social entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter using the excellent group follow tool TweepML.
TweepML has a functionality I've been looking for for a while. It gives people the ability to create and follow entire customized groups of users with one simple click. Martin put together an incredibly comprehensive list of people that I absolutely want to be following, but there was no way I would have gone through it, name by name, following one by one.
The list is incredibly varied. It includes media sites like @SocialEarth and @SocialEdge, individual entrepreneurs like Samasource founder @leila_c, and some inspirational tweeters like @poptech. So far, members of this list have been followed some 6,000 times.
Blog Action Day: Coming to a Blog Near You
Published September 27, 2009 @ 12:34PM PT
For those of us involved with blogging, Tweeting, and all various other forms of social media for social change, the nagging question is whether these tools really have the power to transform and augment communication and organizing for good, or whether we're dramatically overstating their power. Blog Action Day gives us one chance to lay our cards on the table and see what we can really do.
Blog Action Day began a few years ago when creative entrepreneurs Cyan and Collis Ta'eed decided to get together a group of bloggers to pick a day and all write about a similar topic of social importance. 20,000 bloggers later, the first Blog Action Day was a smashing success. A second year followed that success in similar fashion.
This year, the guys at BAD asked Change.org to take the reigns and help take it to the next level. This year, Change.org, in conjunction with lead blogging partners ranging from TMZ.com to Mashable and nonprofit partners like Oxfam, 350, and Greenpeace, will be hosting the third annual Blog Action Day.
On October 15th, bloggers from around the world and from every discipline will be writing posts about Climate Change. We chose climate change because it's an issue that effects every single person on this planet, that involves almost every other issue on the site. Most of all, we chose it because it's an issue that can only be addressed as a community, in which each and everyone of us - regardless of profession, ideology, nationality, or any other characteristic - takes individual responsibility.
With a little over two weeks to go before the event, already almost 2,000 bloggers with a combined audience of just over 8,000,000 people have signed up to participate. Perhaps coolest of all, those bloggers represent 98 countries.
Whether you blog a little, a lot, or not at all, you can sign up to participate by going to the Blog Action Day website. Check out the video below and get excited!
Social Enterprise at Seedcamp?
Published September 11, 2009 @ 04:19PM PT
Tis the season for venture incubators, pitch days, and business plan competitions of all shapes and sizes. Seedcamp, a funding incubator for young startups in Europe has just announced it's 21 finalists. In the mix are a number of organizations that have, if not explicitly social missions, implications for the social sector. These write-ups come from VentureBeat.
"Patients Know Best (Cambridge, UK) — An online platform for patients to send secure messages to their doctors and nurses, receive information about their health, and get advice on preventative and followup care." It's pretty obvious how this one could improve the way that people accessed health care. I'd be interested to see how this aligns or doesn't with something like FrontlineSMS:Medic.
"Teachable (London) — A library of teacher-made resources in any academic subject that are easily adapted to curricula." Again, the social value here is pretty clear. The potential of the internet to democratize access to education is immense and as yet relatively untapped. I love the idea of teachers being able to contribute to a communal database.
"VouChaCha (London) — Platform that delivers coupons and discount vouchers straight to your smart phone." This may not seem profound, but with the economy as it is, people care more about collected small discounts than ever before. Being able to deliver offers direct to the phone could be wonderful.
I think these companies are good examples of a new ecosystem of web-driven platforms that, while not "social enterprises" in the way we define it in this sector, are still building infrastructure to help address people's problems in simpler, easier ways. It's important for us in the social entrepreneurship space to be connecting our conversations to the consumer web world and looking for ways to leverage the relationship.
(Photo: Leafar)
Branding, Social Media, and Learning to Lose Control
Published September 10, 2009 @ 02:49PM PT
One of the defining realities of modern life is the surfeit of choices we experience. Every time we want to buy something, every time we want to experience something, there are usually more choices than we can accommodate. The importance of brand has risen as people search for good ways to differentiate products and experiences. Today I gave a presentation at the Hub Berkeley about brand, social media, and losing control.
The presentation came out of a lot of what I've been thinking and writing about lately. The conversation about social media is too often ghettoized to the details of things like how to get more followers on Twitter. I think though that the real power of social media is the way in which it is challenging not just company's brands, but the very way brand is established and transmitted.
Some key points of the presentation included:
- The notion that brand is about the feelings people associate with a company, organization, idea, or person, or to use Zefrank's language, the "emotional aftertaste."
- Brand matters more than ever because of the increase in consumer choice and the fracturing of distribution platforms
- The internet changes the experience of brands and gives individuals more power to remix messages, spread things they like, connect with other critics of things they don't and generally take control of brands
- Nonprofits have to create specific value for their stakeholders to engage with for them to successfully differentiate themselves from other mission-driven organizations
See the full presentation here:
And take a few minutes to watch Zefrank on branding as well:
(Photo: Liako)
SoCap09 Day One Blogger Roundup
Published September 02, 2009 @ 09:41AM PT
One of the major differences between SoCap08 and SoCap09 is the dramatic uptick in the number of folks blogging, tweeting, capturing video, and generally creating content around the event. After the first day, here are some of the notable pieces:
SoCap09 Day 1: Future of Social Innovation on the Web: Pop!Tech blogger Ashni Mohnot writes about one of the more interesting panel, a conversation that included representatives of Virgance, Kiva.org, and Change.org.
SoCap09 Day 1: Attendance Tops 1000: Triple Pundit's Jim Witkin provides a nice overview of first day highlights.
Socially Responsible Schwag As Metaphor for SoCap09: Beth Kanter writes up the story of the attendee bags, made by former trashpickers in Indonesia.
The Role of Government in Social Innovation: Marco writes up the keynote by Office of Social Innovation director Sonal Shah and the panel that followed.
The Best Pictures of SOCAP09 Day 1!: Pretty self explanatory. Thanks Simon for the photos in this post.
Social Entrepreneurs and SoCap09: Erik Hersman opens a major question: if social entrepreneurs are create businesses that improve their communities, is every African a social entrepreneur?
Future of Social Innovation on the Web SoCap09: Beth's interview with Premal Shah from Kiva.org:
Twitter, Facebook Shut Down in Attempt to Silence Activist
Published August 08, 2009 @ 02:11PM PT
On Thursday and Friday millions of social media users found themselves frustrated and without access to services like Twitter and Facebook. News reports soon came in that the outages were being caused by an ongoing and coordinated hacker attack. Just today, the story got even more interesting, with the New York Times reporting that the target of the attack appears to have been a single person, a 34 year old economics professor and refugee activist from the Republic of Georgia.
From the Times:
During the assault — the latest eruption in a yearlong skirmish between nationalistic hackers in Russia and Georgia — unidentified attackers sent millions of spam e-mail messages and bombarded Twitter, Facebook and other services with junk messages. The blitz was an attempt to block the professor’s Web pages, where he was revisiting the events leading up to the brief territorial war between Russia and Georgia that began a year ago.
The attacks were “the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters,” Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer of the Internet security firm F-Secure, said in a blog post. “The amount of collateral damage is huge. Millions of users of Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook have been experiencing problems because of this attack.”
Apparently, this sort of cyberwar has been an ongoing feature of the conflict between Russia and Georgia. The latest flare-up of the contact was the August 2008 South Ossetia war. South Ossetia was a formerly autonomous and now disputed region. The conflict around the region sparked in the early nineties and then lay dormant for a decade until the early 2000s.
A new feature of the latest contact was the element of cyber attacks meant to dismantle communications structures and sew confusion about information. There were some reports during the August conflict that Georgian government websites were under external control.
This more recent series of attacks included an attempt to discredit the professor by spamming millions of people with links to his online sites, as well as denial of service attacks meant to shut down those sites. The broader impact demonstrated both the fragility and importance of the emerging new media ecosystem.
“They aren’t set up to play the role of a global communications network, but very quickly they’ve come to represent that,” said John Palfrey, a law professor and co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
I've written about the use of Twitter in the Middle East and Iran before, but I continue to be astounded at how rapidly new media is becoming the platofrm for global political information. While it may sometimes feel like there is a lot more hype than appropriate around these new technologies, it behoves every activist anywhere to understand them.
Social Media and the Shifting Power Dynamics of Philanthropy
Published August 06, 2009 @ 08:44AM PT
At the beginning of the month, the NonProfit Times released it's annual "Power and Influence Top 50" - a list of the 50 people driving and shaping the world of philanthropy and civil society. While the list is full of amazing people, there is one type of person conspicuously absent: bloggers.
The list is a virtual who's-who of philanthropy and nonprofit work. Some are honored for their attempts to better train the nonprofit industry, others are noted for the innovation which they've instilled in their foundations. The one major homage to technology comes in the recognition of Holly Ross, director of the awesome NTEN nonprofit technology conference.
But there is something missing there. It's becoming increasingly clear that "nonprofit technology" is not an easily distinct category from "nonprofit work." Social media is young, yes, but it is already showing signs of the dramatic shifts it's creating in the way that average citizens interact with nonprofits.
First, it is changing fundraising. Where as fundraising used to be the solely about getting a big enough list of names that some would respond to your appeal, it's now increasingly about figuring out reasons and platforms for your core supporters to engage their friends and connections. This is what giving platforms like GlobalGiving are all about.
Second, it is changing the actual choices about how people engage with philanthropic endeavors. Sites like Kiva.org give people a fundamentally different option for their dollars, and it's an option that many find is more compelling, personal, and fun than what traditional groups offer.
Third, it is changing the nature of where important conversations are held. Whereas exclusive gatherings were once the only space to talk with though leaders and influential people, blogs have now become a convening point for ongoing conversations about the shifting approaches and priorities of philanthropy and social change more broadly.
Case in point. Sean Stannard-Stockton's Tactical Philanthropy, maybe the single must-read blog for the philanthropically minded, has recently been host to a wildly engaged and intense debate about high-performance vs. high-impact nonprofits. His original post making the distinction unleashed over thirty comments, and the five plus follow-on posts have produced dozens more. The important thing to note though is not just that there are a lot of comments, but that the comments are from leaders of major philanthropic organizations like Charity Navigator and even the author of a book that was questioned in one of the posts.
The point is that Sean has the distribution to unleash a conversation on his blog that previously never would have been held in that sort of public setting, and which frankly, Sean might not have been invited to be a part of. That's not a knock on Sean at all, but simply a recognition that it's no longer the presidents of foundations who get to convene conversations and have a say in how the field is changing.
