It Really is a Small World

"Trusted and loyal ASW members who meet certain criteria have the privilege of inviting a limited number of their friends to the network. If you know someone with this privilege, you can ask them to invite you. If not, please be patient and continue to ask around in your own personal and professional circles.”

Ouch? That’s the message on one of the opening pages of A Small World (ASW), a self-described “private international community of culturally influential people who are connected by three degrees.” This exclusive social network seems to contradict much of what we think when we hear “social networking sites,” which are generally described as huge, open networks that generate a lot of "noise" like Facebook or Twitter. It also contradicts Emmanuel Rosen’s faith in the six degrees of separation theory, which ASW has now tightened to only three degrees. But, this site has generated a lot of attention and highlights an interesting genre of social networking: niche networking sites. While other niche sites like Linked In, which caters to professionals, or Classmates.com which connects classmates together, or even Tripadvisor.com which brings together people based on travel experiences, this type of exclusivity is new to the online social networking model and has proven to be a contributor, generator, and facilitator of buzz.

So perhaps we’re on to something here – can a closed, tight-knit community catering to a specific demographic be a marketer's dream? ASW's strategy has proven to be wildly successful. A huge benefit of these types of networks is that they generate appeal to advertisers who want to target a specific group of people in one place (in ASW’s case, advertisers include high-end luxury brands such as Mercedes and Cartier). It also can serve as a breeding ground for word of mouth marketing among like-minded individuals who are interested in the same products.

Niche social networking sites eliminate the daunting complexity of social networks that Rosen describes. On this site, particularly, marketers can be sure that a person’s “friends” are actually a direct friend of the person, or a friend of a friend – only separated by a maximum of three degrees. Unlike larger social networks that cater to the general population, such as Facebook, ASW actually shows “tie strength,” a concept Rosen says social networks lacks. On ASW, you can click on someone’s friend and a map showing how they know each other and through who appears. It's always a close connection.

However, ASW does reinforce Rosen’s principle that people who have similar interests and likes and are generally similar to each other are more likely to link together. ASW is a perfect example of this. It’s a forum where people with similar cultural interests can gather and discuss travel, entertainment and nightlife in discussion forums. Users can gain new information from people that they are not directly connected to, but are still in the same network, which Rosen describes as important criteria for buzz to spread. The forums on ASW are brimming with comments, questions, experiences, suggestions, and advice. In addition, people on ASW also take their relationships offline, forming small gatherings. and real-life “clusters” to network with each other, share information, meet new people, etc.

Perhaps such niche social networking sites are the wave of the future?

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.

Millenial Makeover

No wonder "Millenial Makeover" is one of the NYT Favorite Books of 2008 - it discusses some of the most pressing issues of our time: how social media affects elections and politics. The book discusses how the winning party will successfully use and keep up with technology. This technology, according to the book, is rapidly changing the political environment.

It does a fairly decent job of describing the current political environment, and predicting the future - tracing how technology changed everything from pop culture, such as music and movies, to national politics. I'd like to think of myself as a "millenial," the way the book describes them - the early adopters of society, the optimistic politically and economically, the ultimate group that every marketer wants to reach because they are the movers and shakers. It's the ultimate book for anyone wanting to learn more about and understand this millenial generation - how to reach them, identify what they want, and give it to them. It provides surprising insight into the 2008 elections -- which set a precedent for using technology to gain support quickly and efficiently. The book also discusses how campaign techniques - fundraising, advertising, etc - have been revolutionized by millenial thinkers and technology.

The insights offered in this book are valuable to anyone wanting to understand domestic politics and their correlation with the technological world.

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.

Act.ly and Social Networks

I love act.ly! I am learning about it through my digital political strategy class at JHU. I just participated in a petition/experiment that my professor Dr. Alan Rosenblatt is conducting. Apparently there is a game for Twitterers called Mobster World (I'm not even going to link to it so that this doesn't happen to you too... you can search for it if you want!). If you sign up to play this game, it will hijack your follower list on Twitter and send them a direct message FROM YOU if you sign up to play! There's no way to make this stop - no contact information on Mobster's site and no way for people to click and opt-out.

Not only is this super-annoying but it's just WRONG! This got me remembering how annoying cold calling and automated calling is, especially when the "robot" fails and calls you at 2AM. At least now, I can do something about it from my own desk. I signed up for act.ly and "signed" Dr. Rosenblatt's petition by allowing act.ly to Tweet the cause on my Twitter account. My irritation actually led me to find and follow EndTheRoboCalls on Twitter and all sorts of interesting and cool petitions that I can participate in on Act.ly.

This takes advantage of the essence of social networking: republishing information to individual social networks makes that information viral and reaches many people quickly.

Maybe I'll start a petition to remove tourists who stand on the left of the escalators (when they should be standing on the right, walking on the left) from the Metro system. :)

Person-to-Person-to-Person

It really doesn't seem so hard to use social networking to your advantage - but in reality, it is.

A group of leading expert thinkers on the strategy and the how-to behind maximizing the benefits from social networking sites teamed up to write Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User Generated Content (PDF), published by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, and they say that social networks should be a part of a multi-faceted Internet strategy.

This stuff is so interesting to me because it's so new and the rules of the game on the Internet are so flexible. While bringing up some very salient points that all users of social media should remember in order to be successful (keep your information up-to-date, be active in an online community, and build trust among users), the report also suggests very interesting ideas for success such as promoting more user-generated content (letting go of the reigns of control seems to be a difficult thing for many organizations, including mine!) and using the Internet to research and learn more about your demographics and audiences before attempting to target them (the report offers gather.com, asianavenue.com, momsrising.com and more as good research sites). Another measure of success is the ability to translate online action into offline action, or even vice versa, such as in the case of townhall.com. A conservative talk radio company purchased the community website to harness the power of their listeners; the website has now become a place for interactivity, conversation, discussion, and blogging. They therefore turned a passive activity such as listening into activism through Internet technology.

The report also discusses the importance of youth, a historically forgotten demographic. Youth have proven to be strong social movers and shakers and, according to this report, social media strategies should be geared toward attracting and energizing youth as a primary audience. They're the ones who are more likely to use the Internet as a part of their daily lives because they are more accustomed to it, having grown up during the Internet boom.

Another key point that this report makes that I thought was interesting is the role of the "influencer" or the "leader". Finding these people are essential to online success using social networks. Influencers and leaders aren't necessarily people with big jobs or big titles, according to the report, or even people with big names. They are the people with established networks who helps to inform people and successfully changes their minds. Spending time and effort finding and talking to these people is not only beneficial but important in reaching others. These people can also help move online information offline easily.

Why has the Internet been so successful with "bringing grassroots back" as the report says? I think its simply because of convenience. We're in the information-overload age. We are too busy, too tired, and have too many people in our lives to take care of and worry about. Many of us aren't financially or physically able to participate in live demonstrations, protests, or other methods of real-life activism on issues we care about.

The Internet solves this dilemma. We can be contributing citizens, we can rally and organize groups, we can socialize with one another, we can inform each other, we can serve as the highest form of checks and balance for our government and we can bring down corrupt politicians, journalists and others by never leaving our desks.

We just have to let go of our controls and let the audiences speak.

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.

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.