ADC and Social Networking

I'm a member of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee on Facebook. They are an issue advocacy group and grassroots civil rights group devoted to empowering and protecting Arab-Americans. They defend civil rights, promote civic participation, defends the interest of Arab-Americans and tries to promote balanced U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Facebook seems to be like a focal point of ADC's activities. With over 2,100 members of it's group, I continually receive messages from the group asking to support or denounce particular legislation in Congress, or messages designed to raise awareness about a particular case or a person. The messages are often short and succint and include a link to direct the group member to a place of action. ADC uses a tool that I find particularly useful is called Capitol Advantage which allows ADC to send out action alerts to its members. When I receive these action alerts, I can read a short summary of the issue at hand (ie: guantanamo, hate crimes, human rights) and who I need to contact (Obama, a Congressional leader, etc), and I don't have to go out of my way to do it. ADC's Action Alert provides a form right there for me to sign my name on and hit send, and they take the responsibility for forwarding it to the appropriate people. It has a pre-drafted letter that is actually editable if you wanted to make some changes ready to go. It even gives you the option of whether you'd like ADC to send it for you through e-mail or as a printed letter.

I can send a concerned letter to my President or my Congressman all through just simply becoming a member of a Facebook group. This was all only one click away from the group's page. The page also provides me links to articles, op-eds, and information about gatherings and demonstrations all from the group's wall.

By being a member of this group on facebook, I feel automatically connected to the 2,100 and I feel as though I'm an active participant by simply taking out a minute of my day to post an interesting link to an article or by clicking send on a letter advocating for crucial change.

Here Comes Everybody....

Clay Shirkey's "Here Comes Everybody" uses real-life examples and interesting brain teasers to get across his point that power is generated through groups of people and not individuals. The connection I appreciated the most was the one he made between the function of groups and the success of online social networks. MySpace,Facebook, Flickr and YouTube haven't all succeed because of great company organization and management and a dedicated staff and a powerful public relations strategy (albeit, these are certainly factors in its success), but they've succeed through the power of people to communicate with one another. They've also succeeded because they meet the powerful psychological need for humans to be heard.

An example of this that Shirkey gives in his book is what Flickr did went it first started -- the president had her staff comment on other people's albums and photos to get the site off the ground and to show people that someone was out there watching and listening. A lot of Shirkey's book made me think about the psychology of people in a group. Take the Facebook wall, for example. A person's "wall" is a place where everyone can see someone's status updates (what they are currently doing) and where members of Facebook can have a very public "conversation" back and forth by posting on each other's walls. It is known that the "walls" are very public places. Why not have a private conversation through personal messaging or email? Why display conversations for all? Shirkey would argue that this is the group phenomenon; communication between groups is no longer private and it's no longer limited to real-world meetings. This "user-generated content", he says, isn't created for general consumption, or even for a large audience. It's geared toward a community of people - usually a small, pre-connected group of people, and this, according to Shirkey, is revolutionizing the way we communicate with each other. It is now imperative to understand this type of communication in order to reach people in the digital age. This new era of public communication brings about information overlaod and requires us to filter our information accordingly. The difference between small group communication and broadcast communication is where the fundamental changes lie; participation and production of information also now lies within the group, rather than with an elite group of writers, journalists, authors, who craft a message only directed toward large audiences.

Also particularly striking about Shirky's book is how we currently underestimate the connections and the power that a group has. He demonstrates this using the Birthday paradox, which is, according to Wikipedia, the following:

In probability theory, the birthday problem, or birthday paradox pertains to the probability that in a set of randomly chosen people some pair of them will have the same birthday. In a group of at least 23 randomly chosen people, there is more than 50% probability that some pair of them will have the same birthday. Such a result (for just 23 people, considering that there are 365 possible birthdays) is counter-intuitive to many.

Shirky uses this to show that there are many more connections among a group of people than we are inclined to think. The power of groups are harnessed when they are given the tools to work together.

This type of power is especially harnessed in social media, which makes it easy for people to contribute by providing them with the tools. For example, contributing to Wikipedia is super easy. You don't have to have any technological knowledge. You just log-in and edit and add to the collective knowledge and information. Another example of this harnessed group power, similar to Shirky's Linux example, is the Content Management System that we use here at USIP. It's called Drupal. Drupal is an open-source software that is continually built upon and enhanced by a large community of users. There are Drupal developers out there - but lots of other types of developers - web developers, software developers, coders, analysits, etc - contribute to making the system customizable and usable. Drupal has a large community of users that share and benefit from each others experiences with the system.

On the down side, however, while this book had a lot to offer, I didn't really feel like this book had anything new to offer, other than re-energizing me to think more deeply about how looking at the psychology of humans can help better understand their behavior in a group. Shirky's an idealist who is very much pro-technology, but rarely looks at the consequences of group collaboration and how this could negatively impact individual recognition and work.

Webcasting Today

Ahh, social networking. Today's webcast was successful, but I won't have complete numbers for you until tomorrow.

Embedding that Twitter widget (a picture of our webcasting page and the embedded Twitter widget that I used, above) that showed real-time updates of our Twitter feed onto the page that featured the live webcast today seemed to work well -- except it kept scrolling through ALL of our tweets, even ones that were 60 days old! I tried to stop the loop in the java script code but to no avail. Might have to do some more research on how to control how many tweets are displayed when I have a bit more time, but overall the widget worked great..You can find it at:

http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets

Another problem with this widget is, however, that it only displays YOUR feed. It doesn't display everyone who's talking about your issue using the hashtag. This seems to hinder conversation a bit more. It'd be interesting for readers to get a whole picture of the conversation that's happening. I'm looking into using TweetGrid for our next live webcast in hopes to engage our audiences in more of a conversation, rather than just passive readers of our tweets.

According to TweetDeck (also awesome, check it out at: http://tweetdeck.com/beta/) we had about 11 people talk to us via Twitter during the event -- mostly commenting on our speaker's remarks or RT'ing our live tweets. Not bad....! Rigby would be proud of our microblogging - we put a human face to our name and helped reach out to a global audience who didn't actually have to be in Washington to attend the event.

Twitter Strategy for Gov Departments

Found an awesome template outlining a strategy for governments using Twitter:

http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/post/2009/07/21/Template-Twitter-strategy-for-Government-Departments.aspx

These points seem especially critical to me:

• To set clear objectives and metrics to make sure there's a return on the investment of staff time (and if there isn’t, we’ll stop doing it)
• To make sure the channel is used consistently and carefully, to protect corporate reputation from silly mistakes or inappropriate use
• To plan varied and interesting content, and enthuse those who will provide it into actively wanting to do so.

Review: Rigby's "Mobilizing Generation 2.0"

Ben Rigby's book Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0 focuses on using Web 2.0 tools to engage youth in political conversation. The book does an excellent job of providing a very basic overview of these tools, but doesn't necessarily keep its focus on youth. In fact, the principles Rigby discusses in his book can be used across all audiences and all types of organizations -- not just political ones.

Rigby covers blogging, social networking, video and photo sharing, mobile phones, wikis, maps and virtual worlds. While reading the book, I had USIP in mind. We use some of these tools, but not all. We are active participants on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but Rigby’s book helped me think about how to use Flickr and Digg. We also use Viewbook for photo sharing and for creating easy slideshows that we can embed on our website. Rigby doesn’t mention it, but I highly recommend it: http://www.viewbook.com/. USIP also uses a wiki as our Intranet site; according to Rigby, using a wiki can help improve internal communication. It also helps decentralize information and allows multi-users to contribute content and feel like they are participating in their organization.

Ribgy also spent a lot of time in each chapter discussing the consequences of trying to build a Web 2.0 tool from scratch – either trying to build one’s one social network or hosting one’s one media content, etc. He advises against this because of the amount of staff dedication and effort it takes to maintain these sites. He says that time could be better spent strategizing and benefiting from users of an existing social network instead. He’s right about this point – unless your organization has the time, money, and staff to host their own services, making use of existing ones are far beneficial. Event at USIP, with a staff about 250 and our own IT department, we use existing social networks and have determined that building our own Web 2.0 tools would be less fruitful for us.

Perhaps the most surprising of all was the success of virtual networks such as Second Life. Although I knew that Second Life had received a lot of media attention, I didn't realize that organizations such as BBC Radio had demonstrated success using Second Life, as Rigby mentions. I also didn’t realize the power of mobile phones in connecting people – I always think of mobile phones as something personal and private, rather than a tool to be used to blast marketing messages. Rigby does point out, however, that using mobile phones isn’t quite popular yet because of the restrictions placed on them by phone companies.

Throughout the book, Rigby emphasizes the important of “tagging” and “folksonomy” – the taxonomy of the people. Tagging content online is the future – it can help organize thousands of files into searchable terms that people can readily use. I’m happy to report that USIP’s new website, launched June 2009, employs the tagging strategy to help people find the content they are looking for. They can see all content that have been tagged for a particular issue area on our site. Our feedback as shows that tagging does indeed improve the functionality of the website, and I agree wholeheartedly with Rigby that this is the wave of the future and perhaps an important part of Web 3.0 – the semantic web.

Using Social Networking: Twitter and USIP

The U.S. Institute of Peace is a Congressionally funded think-tank that I've worked at for nearly 4 years now. It's an interesting paradox because we're not a federal agency, but we're funded by Congress. We're not an advocacy group, but our goal is to share our research and tools for peacebuilding and peacekeeping. Here's our mission statement:

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to help:

• Prevent and resolve violent international conflicts
• Promote post-conflict stability and development
• Increase conflict management capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide

The Institute does this by empowering others with knowledge, skills, and resources, as well as by directly engaging in peacebuilding efforts around the globe.

Therefore, in order to be effective and continue to receive funding, engaging people with our work is essential to our success. One of the primary strategies is using the web to disseminate and share our work. I manage and help create the online strategy for USIP.org.

Social networking is becoming an increasingly important part of the strategy of USIP.org, which I help craft. This strategy is a continual process that grows and evolves with trends and the needs of our audiences.

Recently, we've improved the webcasting capabilities of USIP.org. USIP often convenes public events relevant to current political issues. We've had to come up with innovative ways to reach our global audience that aren't always able to attend events in Washington. One of the ways we've chosen to do this, in addition to webcasting, is through social networking tools on the web.

On Monday, (9/21) we'll be hosting a live webcast of one of our events on preventing mass atrocities. Should be quite interesting. During the live stream, I'll be able to monitor how many people are logged in watching. In addition to advertising this event through email blasts and on our site's homepage, we've also looked at interactive ways to promote this event. USIP hosts a twitter page that I manage and am involved in. It has about 700 followers. We've advertised there too - and on Friday, I discovered that Twitter offers a neat little widget that allows you to embed live Twitter updates into your website. I'm trying to experiment and discover the best ways to maximize our visibility on Twitter, and how engaging in dialogue with users of the Twitter network can help my organization better understand what type of information interests our audiences.

We've assigned someone to tweet live during the event and assigned the event a hash tag to engage our followers in a discussion. I've also embedded the Twitter widget onto our event webpage so that users can watch the live webcast and read our tweets during the event simultaneously in one place.

Like Ben Rigby says in his book Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using the Web, using Web 2.0 tools appropriately is a successful method of engaging the public - especially youth. Rigby calls the Twitter service "microblogging": a short, informal way to have a conversation with an audience. Our ultimate goal is to engage people on policy issues related to peacebuilding through Web 2.0 tools such as microblogging.

My next posts - on Sunday and Monday - will be review the Ribgy book in more detail (so far, I highly recommend it as a go-to beginner's handbook on Web 2.0 tools. It's perfect for someone who's looking for background information to convince their organization to use Web 2.o, or who just wants to have a basic understanding of the tools) and I'll be reporting back on the success of using USIP.org's Web 2.0 strategies to engage in a two-way conversation with our audiences. I'll be monitoring how many people are logged in to the live webcast to see if our online marketing efforts paid off and I'll also be monitoring our Twitter status to see how many people engage us in conversation, how many people "retweet" our tweets, or mention us in their own posts (this would have a desirable viral effect.. more on that later), and I'll be working with our specialist who is tweeting live during the event to ensure that we are following the instructions carefully outlined in Rigby's book: keeping the messages short, conversational, and most of all, human.

Happy weekend.

A Citizen of the Net

This blog will be used as a part of my Digital Political Strategies graduate course at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. I'll also use it to post my insights from my experiences as a citizen of the net.

I was lucky to become a citizen of the net (a "netizen") at a very early age. I witnessed this complex system of interconnected computer networks grow and change since its inception. Today, the Internet pretty much is my life. I'm currently pursuing a Digital Communications concentration in the Masters of Communications program at Hopkins and have made a career out of studying and researching the many facets of the Internet. I have been a professional in the field of online communications for six years now and am continually amazed at how quickly things grow and change in the online world.