Social Media and the revolution

Mashable offers an article entitled "4 Ways Social Media is Changing the Non-Profit World" Beth Kanter writes that since 2003, social media is beginning to transform both the ways nonprofits work internally, and how they reach out to a broader range of supporters. The four ways she suggests that social media has changed the non-profit world are as follows:

1) They deepen relationships and engagement

2) They allow individuals and small groups to self-organize

3) They facilitate collaboration and crowd sourcing

4) They create social change within organizations as they flatten hierarchies and make internal processes more efficient

While these claims may be true, and do hold in parts of the Western world, at least on some level, prominent thinkers may disagree with an assessment of social media that is all wine and roses. For example, Clay Shirky writes, "No one believes social media _causes_ otherwise complacent citizens to become angry enough to take to the streets. It’s a convenient straw man for the skeptics, because, as an obviously ridiculous narrative, it’s easy to refute." and Malcolm Gladwell contentiously suggests "the revolution will not be tweeted."

They make these critical claims precisely because whenever a social media platform has been held up as a cause of revolution or dramatic social change, journalists often fail to mention the important human actions and activities outside of social media use. For example, in the recent uprising in Egypt, revolution was facilitated early on not by Twitter, but by the fact that revolutionaries were lighting themselves on fire for their cause. Or as Gladwell rightly mentions, it is ideological fervour, not social media, that leads to revolution.

It is also true to say that despite the very important good things that social media brings to the table (the list outlined by Mashable is probably an accurate portrayal of social media's positives), people were engaging in important activism long before the internet using the tools they had available to them. And the tools people used in the past were no less effective for creating action than the tools we have now. In fact, some could argue that the television was the most powerful tool for mobilizing people on world issues, since it was the first medium that truly connected the world in a visceral way. They would say that social media is not really new, and rather is an extension of what television was already doing.

I tend to agree with these critics because while it is easy to lie back and laud social media as the "killer app" that will make everything easier for both traditional business, nonprofit organizations and revolutionaries alike, it is much more difficult, but also important to take a critical look at social media. When we do this, we can see that while social media do play a role in facilitating communication in many situations, they do so as part of a much broader communication environment that must include traditional media and other less technologized actions and forms of communication.


It is easy when we are first learning about social media to see it as something that solves all our communication problems, but it is not simply that. It is rather, a tool that offers as many challenges as opportunities, and if we are not aware of potential challenges, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment.

Links to help with your research papers.

It's research paper season here in Academia land, and so this post will provide a list of helpful links for those people who are diligently working on their final class papers.

For writing help:

I always check the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University. It can help you with every step of the writing process from outline to final draft.

The OWL has specific pages that I recommend for students who are engaging in the academic writing process. Their advice on crafting a thesis statement is very good! As is their advice on developing an outline.

In Academic writing, it is crucial that you cite and reference your sources correctly and often. I like to use APA style referencing because it's a gender neutral referencing style.

Google Scholar can be a surprisingly helpful resource for finding references, but make sure you use it carefully and sparingly.  I often begin with a search on Google Scholar, and then move on to a more specific search in my library.

For internet-related articles, I like to check The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and First Monday. Both journals are top notch.

Public Relations Review is a journal dedicated to public relations. The latest issue has an article about Twitter use during the Haiti earthquake. You can access it through the Ryerson Library.

Sometimes you can even find full books online. Project Gutenberg provides free online archived ebooks for books that have fallen into the Canadian public domain.

A Question of TIme

I was at a communication studies conference this weekend, and a conference is a great place to get inspired academically and professionally.

There were many topics covered at this conference (The Communication studies Graduate Caucus at Carleton University) among the ones I found most interesting were:

• Neglected discourses of sexism, racism and homophobia perpetuated by the players of online games (this was the keynote)
• A closer look at viral marketing
• The digitization of libraries
• Different ways to consider the body with respect to mobile technologies and the internet
• And finally, the idea of time as a valuable resource.

It is this last point that I would like to explore. To use social media properly, whether personally or professionally takes time. This is either time taken away from other activities we could be doing, or in the case of business, sometimes this results in a monetary cost as time needs to be met with increased levels of staffing. This effects our businesses in two ways.

First of all, we have to remember that everyone's time resources are finite, so if they are to choose to engage with our social media campaign, then they will not be doing something else. Therefore, we need to give people a convincing reason to spend their time with us.

Secondly, we have to choose how much of our own resources we can or want to devote to our social media campaign. How much resource expenditure is worth what kind of return? If we spend too little, we might not be able to earn the engagement of our audience. However, if we spend too much, the return on our investment may not be satisfactory.

People have unlimited amounts of love. In other words. they can love multiple products or companies equally without diminishing their feelings for each. People do not have unlimited amounts of time or money however, and in order for our social media campaigns to be successful, we need to take seriously the idea of time as a resource for ourselves and for our clients/customers.

Social Media and the End of Gender

Johanna Blakley gave a great TED talk, which you can access here on Social Media and the End of Gender.

I heartily encourage everyone to watch it - it provides great food for thought.

It's true to say that women are one of the fasted growing demographics of social media users. It is also true to say that studies have shown that women use social media differently than men do. For example, women tend to spend more time per visit on sites like Facebook than their male counterparts.

But does this mean the end of gender? Can we say that conventional ideas of gender, or conventional methods of marketing to people of different genders is going to change? It's not that simple.

To move beyond gender, it's going to take more than social media use. Marketing is a big part of gender socialization and is targeting children at younger and younger ages. Peggy Orenstein explores this complex social phenomenon in her new book Cinderella Ate my Daughter. Though online women have more ability to choose products, services and entertainment that do not resonate with conventional gender roles, they still have to decide to make that choice. And in reality, most women do make choices which conform to societal expectations of gender roles (as evidenced by the success of Sex in the City part two).

So, I appreciate that social media creates new opportunities for choice, but it's not a magic bullet. In reality we have to understand social media as part of a complex web of social forces that take place both on and offline.

Your Number One Social Media Goal

Last week, we discussed social media strategic planning, and everyone wrote about it on their blogs.

Most of you (correctly) identified the importance to defining goals as the first step in your social media strategic planning process.

But defining goals can be a tricky task, and different companies or organizations will of course have vastly different goals, and as a result, vastly different social media campaigns. That goes without saying.

But there is one goal that every social media plan should have in common.

It sounds easy, but is surprisingly difficult.

I can summarize it in one word.

Are you ready to hear what it is?

The one goal every social media plan should have in common is:

Listen.

No matter what platform suits your organization best, no matter what your end social media strategic plan looks like, you will lose out if you do not in some way use social media to listen to your clients.

People want to feel like the companies or organizations that they do business with care about them. People want to feel like they matter. People want to feel like their thoughts, feelings and ideas matter to someone and that they are heard by anyone who can make a difference.

The old PR model of broadcasting a message out on as many channels as possible is not quite dead yet, but it is certainly not enough.

The social media model is a two-way street. People may choose to listen to what you have to say, but now you have to give them a reason to.

But the reason can be as easy (and as achingly difficult) as just taking the time to listen, and let your clients or customers know you are listening.

At the very least, it's a good first step - and it must be part of your social media planning and implementation.

Social media trends - The death of geosocial apps? I say probably not.

In class this week, I've asked everyone to write about strategic planning. But since I don't want to give anything away on my blog, I'm not going to do that. Instead I'm going to write about one social media trend that I find puzzling and the kind of questions it raises about the future of social media/real life integration.

The trend that I'd like to discuss today is known as Geosocial networking. It is the linking of traditional social networking with the GPS capabilities found on most peoples mobile devices. It started innocently enough, with social networking applications which allowed people to review restaurants they were visiting or offer travel tips to fellow smartphone users, but now it's grown to the point where people are expressing concerns about their privacy.

Now, I've always been one of those people who was nervous with the mere thought that my phone had GPS on it, and was trackable, so I am obviously not the target audience for geosocial networking. If you Google the term "geosocial networking" you'll be treated to articles on why it's doomed to fail, but despite this, I'm not sure this trend is going to die a predictable death in all communities. There are two reasons for this:

1) Firstly, studies have shown that the younger generation is less concerned with personal privacy than those who came before them. Maybe they don't want to participate in geosocial networking from their home, but perhaps these individuals would be open to participating some of the time, when they are in a public place, going to see the popular blockbuster movie or sold-out concert.

2) Secondly, and more importantly, we have to consider different community norms and how these norms may impact the adoption of certain technologies. For example, some of my best friends in the queer community have successfully used geosocial applications for everything from finding where to eat dinner to finding a potential romantic partner. In this community, there tends to exist a cultural norm that leaves people more open to meeting strangers (who usually are only one or two degrees of separation away from you anyway). In this case, geosocial applications are less an invasion of privacy and more an invitation to a friend you haven't met yet. I wonder if community norms in these cases will keep some of these applications afloat for a very long time (relatively speaking of course).

So while I don't understand geosocial applications myself, I am less likely to forsee their impending doom. At most, I predict that they will find a niche place in the long tail of the diverse internet.

But I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For...

This week in MT8425 we're discussing web metrics or the ways that we can determine whether our web campaigns are successful. For me lately, a big related question has been how are people finding the information they need when they go online.

The web is a giant sea of information. Social media has expanded the resources available to everyone because as it turns consumers of media into producers, information grows exponentially via blogs, tweets, wikis, and image and video uploading sites.

This is a great step forward for democratic communication, however it presents the public with a serious problem. How do we sift through the barrage of information in order to find exactly what we are looking for? And once we think we've found what we are looking for, how do we know the information we've found is reliable and trustworthy.

Of course if business leaders and social media experts could figure this one out, it would allow us to really reach our target audience more efficiently, but as the situation stands right now, one of the biggest challenges of online or social media PR is getting your message out amidst a sea of competing messages.

Here's what we do know:

1. Google is still the most popular search engine, and has been for years.
2. People who use Google seldom make it past the first page of search results.
3. You can't beat Google - they always update and refine their algorithm, so SEO or search engine optimization cannot trick the search engine into moving your website higher up in the list.

But in addition I also suspect the following:

1. People tend to use Google to find websites that they already trust when they are looking for information. In other words, they'll go to a traditional media outlet first, because they know they can trust names like The Globe and Mail, or The New York Times.
2. People will also click through to information provided by their social network (on or offline) but they tend to do this more often when presented with an interesting link, not when they are looking for specific information.
3. People probably have a relatively small number of sites which they consult on a regular basis, therefore when they find something they can count on, they will regularly return to it.

I am in the process of researching the final three points. All data we gain will give us clues that can help us better reach people with the message we want to send. If we know what sites people actively seek, then we can leverage that information in order to get the public to come to us, so that we do not have to work as hard to go to them.