I'm taking two classes this semester at Johns Hopkins - International Public Diplomacy and Public Relations in the Age of Digital Influence. This weekend, I've been immersed in Emanuel Rosen's book, "The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited," in what seems like the first moment of quiet I've had to just read and think in ages (thanks, blizzard!). I realized that a concept was beginning to emerge that was important, if not vital, to success in both public diplomacy and social media strategies: listening. Yep, listening.

A concept that seems so native to us is so difficult to put into practice. Listening is the silver lining of the successful case-studies that Rosen presents; the companies that listened to what their audiences wanted, whether it was to solve their grievances, answer questions, or even just to provide a way to easily contact the organization, were successful in their attempts to control the message they wanted to deliver to their audiences. Listening is the elusive task that any corporation wanting to make the most of word of mouth marketing or take advantage of the social media groundswell needs to master in order to craft a successful marketing strategy. But no one really does it.

My organization is a prime example of this. We set up both Facebook and Twitter pages just to be "involved" in the social media groundswell, without really listening to what our users wanted from us on these networks. How were these networks different from our website? Would they offer new, original content, or would they simply serve to expand the reach of the content on our website? Did our users expect us to talk to them, to engage them, to interact act with them, or to just pump out information? What did they want to know about us? Was social media important enough for us to allocate staff time and resources to it? Not having the answers to these questions is costing us to miss a prime opportunity to generate buzz around our organization using these incredibly powerful tools, especially in light of our new headquarters project that is beginning to become a visible part of the national mall's landscape.

Because of this, we can't quite call our presence on these sites a success yet, because we haven't even begun to do the initial listening and research. Stephen Colbert, the host of this year's Grammy's, asked his daughter several times during the show, "am I cool now?" She kept shaking her head. And I keep shaking mine because just having a presence on these sites, just like being present at the Grammy's, does in no way make us "cool." We have to actually do something - interact, become part of the the community, and give our users what they're looking for, just like how an artist at the Grammy's who performs something or wins something engages audiences and gives them something to talk about, to have a successful presence.

Similarly, listening is a vital, yet underused tool in public diplomacy. So many campaigns fail because they don't address what people want, or don't answer the questions people are looking for. Take the State Department's failed Shared Values campaign, for example. The undersecretary of public diplomacy commissioned a series of videos showing Muslims happily living in America. The videos were shown to Muslim audiences abroad in an effort to help combat growing anti-American sentiment. In the end, the campaign was deemed a failure. Anti-American sentiment was growing out of a dislike of U.S. foreign policies, and not out of a dislike of American culture or Muslims living in America. State department officials had failed to listen, and therefore, failed to address the root of a growing international problem.

Listening is essential to any marketing strategy. And because the Internet is identified as an important facilitator of buzz, companies and organizations should use the myriad of tools available to them online - RSS readers, search engines, newsletters, forums, etc - to listen to what their audiences are discussing and how they are doing it before attempting a strategy. Listening will help organizations identify what triggers conversation, what people are reacting to positively and negatively, and what the best ways are to engage audiences online and will help ensure an organization's success. We also shouldn't forget what Rosen points out in his book: listening is just the first part of a process. It must be in tandem with some type of action for it to be successful.

O.M.G.

You have to see how amazing social networking is.

Bakcground: My status on Facebook today says: "cheers to Obama and to the nobel committee for taking this action to highlight how important diplomacy is to peacemaking."

The attached is a personal message I received on facebook from someone i went to ELEMENTARY school with and have not spoken to in about 18 years.











Text: Hi Dida - I wholeheartedly disagree with you about President Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize. You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but I'm going to choose not to be friends with you because of it.

Dida Atassi: LOL!


Cheers to social networking.

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.

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.