Updates from August, 2009

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  Attitudinal barriers to social media success

  tomjd 1:13 pm on August 26, 2009 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Change Management (3), Clay Shirky, Creative Commons, Nonprofits (3), NPtech (2), Social Change (7)

  Towards the end of the last #4change chat the conversation moved into discussing how most non-profits are not there yet when it comes to social media and the barriers, from the attitudinal to capacity to connectivity, standing in the way. I’ve been thinking more about these issues and want to outline further some of the attitudional barriers that were mentioned. I think it’s these attitudinal, or cultural, barriers which are the most interesting. Resource scarcity and skills shortages are always a challenge for non-profits but, ultimately, are simply a matter of prioritization. Connectivity is obviously essential and very unevenly provided across the globe and, once these other elements are in place a coherent strategy is fundamental to your success. But even with everything else lined up unless your organization has a culture which supports social media it will much less effective at it than hoped for.

  Several of these attitudinal barriers were mentioned during the #4Change chat: Fear, passivity and a desire for control.

  Fear:

  of the unknown, of not doing it right, of missing the mark. Non-profits spend a lot of time worrying about their public perception, and often caring deeply about a wealthier and, often, more conservative cohort (those able to donate substantively to charity and social change) than the population at large. A fear with offending this group can cramp an organization’s style online. You must obviously but mindful of public perception, and be deeply attuned to your brand and values, but social media does requires strategic fearlessness. You’ll make mistakes, you’ll misspell and misspeak occasionally, but learn from these mistakes and get better at social media through practice, it’s the only way.

  Passivity:

  Passivity is never a recipe for success. While it is possible to automate much of your social media, updating your Twitter feed and Facebook page via RSS when a press release or blog post is uploaded, people can tell when you’re not really present on these platforms and will be much less likely to engage with you. If you’re going to make social media a meaningful part of your outreach strategy you need to give it the time and human resources to succeed. You see this repeatedly in Facebook – seemingly every organization in the Western world has a Facebook group but most are clearly never checked, with questions and offers of help unanswered on their wall, projecting the opposite of what you’d want: disinterest. There’s nothing magic about having a Facebook group, the not-so-secret sauce is in actually using it as a space to share information and engage with people. In other words: being proactive. This is equally true for Twitter, MySpace and other social media platforms.

  A desire for control:

  Social Media allows your supports and staff to be more effective advocates for you, and nothing is more effective than people talking in their own words about something they care passionately about. But allowing people to talk in their own words risks your marketing becoming diluted, your finely-crafted messaging forgotten. This can’t be helped but can be mitigated by actively engaging with your supporters and providing them with the tools to better promote you. But if you aren’t comfortable with misspelt words and colloquialisms you’re going to find social media, and the real, human, non-pr language that comes with it, very difficult. If you’re running every draft tweet past senior executives for approval you’re not going to get anywhere.

  You can see an example of this with copyright. Does your organization use Creative Commons licenses for your online media? If not, how can you expect people to help you share your content and your message?

  As Clay Shirky said in his recent TED talk: social media is about convening your supporters, not controlling them.

  Attitudinal factors are only one of the barriers between non-profits and social media success, but they’re an often-overlooked one I believe, less obvious than resourcing issues or inadequate internal processes. I’d love to hear of any others you might have encountered. Being cognizant of these barriers allows us to more effectively lead our organizations through them, creating not only successful social media outreach strategies but more transparent, responsive and adaptive organizations in the process.

  Cross-posted from Tom’s personal blog.

  
   

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• 

  Vote for 4Change at SXSW

  amysampleward 6:05 am on August 24, 2009 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Challenges, Community (2), Competitions, Innovation, Social Change (7), SXSW Interactive, Twitter (15)

  

  Vote here!

  The #4Change crew threw in an idea to the SXSW Interactive conference for next year and we are excited to make it happen, will you help us?!

  VOTE HERE

  or read on to learn more….

  Our Panel Idea

  “Competition > Innovation > Change: Examining Competitions For Social Change”

  Organizations, foundations, even individuals are creating social innovation competitions, hoping to drive social change projects and solutions into the global marketplace.  What are these new competitions about—are they working? How do we—innovators, entrepreneurs—know what’s going to make real-world impact and where do we start? Let’s discuss: join us!

  Here are some of the questions we hope to answer (or at least ask!) in the presentation:

  1. What are social innovation challenges?
  2. Why are challenges important? What need do they serve?
  3. What are the different types of competitions and which work best in driving change?
  4. How can challenges/competitions be used to discover, support, and accelerate social change projects and solutions?
  5. Do social innovation competitions spur real world impact?
  6. Does the success of competitions rely on the judges or the prize money?
  7. What’s required to create competitions that will generate real innovations?
  8. How can challenges support collaboration between projects?
  9. How can communities or groups start their own challenges to solve local issues?
  10. What’s the future of how we use challenges to drive social change?

  How to Vote

  Visit SXSW’s PanelPicker page here and give us a thumbs up!

  Voting will open on August 17th and close on September 4th – so be sure to vote today!

  About SXSW Interactive

  “SXSW Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer. Join us March 2010 for the panels, the parties, the 13th Annual Web Awards, the ScreenBurn at SXSW Arcade, the Film and Interactive Trade Show and Exhibition, Accelerator at SXSW and, of course, the inspirational experience that only SXSW can deliver.”

  About the #4Change Team Presenters

  The panel is comprised of the #4Change team, a group of individuals collaborating to propel the social media for social change conversation forward via monthly Twitter-based chats.  Competitions for change is an important topic to the #4Change community and a Compendium of Competitions has started growing. More at http://4change.memeshift.com

  
   
• 

  #4change chat August: Collaboration and Social Media

  tomjd 1:23 am on August 21, 2009 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
  

  This is cross-posted from Tom’s personal blog:

  Thank you to @lethalsheethal for her excellent and vastly more timely reflection on the chat. Having just discovered it I’d like to recommend http://www.printyourtwitter.com as creating by far the most digestible (and printable, naturally) twitter transcript (ht @writerpollock).

  The topic of the most recent #4change chat was “How does social media open new doors for collaboration?” It was a vibrant and thought-provoking conversation, in my opinion the best #4change chat we’ve had so far.

  There is no question that social media has created enormous new collaborative possibilities. Some of these are in the sharing of data, such as the Social Entrepreneurship API being developed by Social Actions and the merging of the North American green business databases of Gen Green (@gengreen) and 3^rd Whale (@3rdwhale), which was announced at the start of the chat. This was interesting and welcome news, but business alliances of this type are not uncommon. What, we wondered, where the unique collaborative capacities of social media?

  @engagejoe summed up some of these possibilities as “exposing overlap, sharing resources, connecting communities, forging partnerships.” These things are not unique to social media but they are native to it – social media makes overlap and waste more transparent, speeds up information sharing and relationship-building and can increase the impact of collaborations. Messages can be shared between communities and networks both real-time and ad-hoc. And as #4change itself demonstrates conversations can be convened that were never possible before.

  But how much of this is happening? And if these possibilities are not being realized what are the barriers standing in the way?

  The conversation part seems easiest. It is, by definition, what social media facilitates. Making this conversations intentional, productive and constructive is harder, but we still see examples of this all around us, on forums and wiki’s, blogs and microblogs, communities closed and open. These conversations can create new insights, understanding and relationships. And these conversations can lead to concrete action, from protests to petitions, fundraising to collaborative databases.

  There was a real skepticism felt by some in the conversation about whether real work was being done online. This, of course, depends on what real work is to you, but most would agree that hearts and minds are a key part of most forms of social change and so anything that brings us into contact with each other in new ways has the ability to move us in new ways. As Michael Wesch said in his presentation at Personal Democracy Forum this year, “We know ourselves through our relationships with others. New media is creating new ways to relate.”

  But to really scale-up the collaborative possibilities of social media we need to empower and lead our organizations to work together in new ways. As @ChristinasWorld said: “if we could get orgs and passionate people to start working together at a sector/issue level things will start to get exciting.” One key challenge to doing this, as @edwardharran pointed out, is that “social media is pocketed in silos.” While we might wish that this wasn’t the case it is simply a fact of human existence that we build groups at all sizes, but that our closest communities are smaller and more digestible, whether on or offline (although the scale of what’s digestible varies widely between these two states). With these distributed, frustratingly uncoordinated conversations also comes enormous space for innovation and creative thinking. However better search, aggregation and distribution is needed to reveal these conversations to each other in ways that support collaboration. We can see steps in this direction with WiserEarth groups showing related groups and Zanby which allows groups to connect while retaining their independence.

  A schema began to emerge from the conversation which identified three distinct types of collaboration:

  1. organization-to-organization

  2. organization-to-individuals

  3. individuals-to-individuals.

  Again and again the majority of the examples brought up where the later two. For 2. you have organizations like the Sunlight Foundation who are harnessing the contributions of hundreds of coders to create their transparency tools and OneYoungWorld who are using social media to find 1500 leaders of tomorrow. You also have new tools which facilitate this form of collaboration in exciting new ways like The Extraordinaries. For 3. there are grassroots political fundraising campaigns and the entire open source movement.

  (4. was also later suggested by @engagejoe: people-within-organizations. Any more?)

  For 1. there is the previously-cited Social Actions-style data aggregation and sharing and some great examples of organizations collaborating around a social media-enabled campaign, such as the just-launched climate change campaign tcktcktck (@tcktcktc) but there was a clear feeling that much of this landscape remains to be filled out.

  In discussing the barriers to better social media collaboration between non-profits people nominated time intensity vs staffing resources, fear, lack of connectivity in many parts of the world, desire to tightly control their message, geography and time zones and lack of skills as prime candidates. The need for clear strategy so as to not waste precious staff resources was also mentioned, along with the observation that many non-profits do not have the knowledge or experience to develop this strategy.

  To close people were asked for their key takeaways from the conversation:

  • “There is a desire to evolve toward more collaborative outputs; SM [social media] may not be enough to get there” – @ChristinasWorld
  • “It’s given me ideas about the barriers NP [non-profits] face with SM” – @chilli07
  • “I think #4change in itself is a great example of international collaboration” – @tashjudd
  • “Main takeaway: a sense of optimism. SM is not going anywhere and collaboration is only going to continue to get bigger and better” – @edwardharran
  • “SM can be chaotic but still work” – @zerostrategist
  • “I now see more kinds of collaboration: people-within-org, org-to-community, community-to-community, org-to-org” – @engagejoe

  And if I could be so bold as to end on my own takeaway:

  • “We must learn to collaborate as individuals first, then teach our organizations how.”

  ————————————————————————————-

  Please let us know what topics you’d like to cover in future chats!

   
• 

  August #4Change Chat: Opportunities for Collaboration

  amysampleward 6:43 am on August 10, 2009 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Amnesty International, Collaboration (2), Global (2), International, Online Communities (5), Social Media (14), Social Network (3), Twitter (15)

  The next #4change chat is this Thursday – I hope you can join us!

  Details:

  • Date: August, 13th
  • Where: Twitter (search for #4Change)
  • When: 5 – 7 pm US Eastern Time
  • Topic: How do social media open new doors for collaboration (especially internationally)?

  Starting the Conversations

  Unfortunately for me, I will unable to join the chat this Thursday; so, I’d like to offer some conversation starters now to get you thinking of questions, ideas, and stories you want to share!

  Here are some questions to consider:

  • has your organization found new collaborators (other organizations, companies, networks, etc.) for your work via social media use/presence?
  • have you reached out, either as an individual or an organization, with opportunities to collaborate to others you only connected with via social media? why?
  • what issues are unique to collaborations of this type?
  • what kind of reassurances (and what are the mechanisms for providing them) are unique to parties entering collaborations via social media?
  • how could collaborations enabled or maintained via social media be more or less sustainable than traditional tools/outlets?

  And here are some examples to consider:

  • SocialActions – a great example of social media powering the sharing and aggregation (and thus the collaboration and partnership) of social action opportunity portals all over the world
  • Amnesty International, Red Cross, and others – organizers working globally/locally have changed the way they campaign or operate now that they are really in the same space (online)
  • Journalism – writers are now using their social media platforms (whether it’s Twitter or Facebook, or even the newspaper’s comment-enabled websites) to collaborate with witnesses, locals, and experts for their contributions to the story

  Join the Conversation

  1. If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).
  2. To follow the conversation (whether you are planning to contribute or not), use http://search.twitter.com or another application to search on Twitter for “#4Change”
  3. Jump in to the conversation by adding “#4Change” (without the “”) to your Twitter message

  Rules for #Change Chats

  1. #4Change will be structured around a series of questions which all participants can respond to. Send your questions to @tomjd without the hash tag (to keep them out of the stream) to have them considered.
  2. Introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join.
  3. Stay on topic!
  4. Stay cool.

  Join us for the chat this Thursday – looking forward to discussing the role social media play in collaboration!