There’s a lot of talk about being able to manage our privacy and boundaries on various online social networks, but one thing that’s in part missing from the conversation is reminders to ourselves and others that there should be guidelines on how you treat other people. I feel like there’s this notion out there that we are each an island at the mercy of whatever mercurial whims our friends, colleagues, and family throw our way. But what if we started thinking about “do unto others” –not just as we would have done to ourselves, either–as we also cavort about online?
In that spirit, here’s some simple advice about how to treat others with respect and still have fun online. The number one rule? Ask first.
Mind-blowing concept, I know! But with the ease with which we can refer to and tag each other on different services, we forget that sometimes people don’t want to be referred to or tagged. Just because someone has a public profile, doesn’t mean they want to be quoted at every juncture! Here are some standard questions I use:
Can I post what you just said to Twitter and Facebook? Should I credit you, or should it be anonymous/overheard?
I took a great picture of us–check it out. Can I post it and tag you with it?
I’m checking into Foursquare for this restaurant. Can I say that I’m having dinner with you?
Not only does this tell your friend that you actually care about their privacy (most people like that), but it also helps spread the reminder that they should do the same for you and others.
The more you do it, the more comfortable it’ll be for both you and your friends. Now, onward with your sharing!
I had a perfect storm of a project recently, and decided to write it up as a case study in how to manage a short-term social media campaign. I’ll discuss tools, tactics and metrics — hope you find it useful!
At the beginning of December, Aspen Baker, the executive director of Exhale, wrote me an email. “I’m looking for a social media coordinator and web person for a short-term project,” she said. “Interested?” I’ve always been a fan of Aspen’s work at Exhale — they’re a nonprofit organization which provides the first and only nonjudgmental national, multilingual after-abortion talkline. One of the things I love most about Exhale, which I learned largely through their campaign, is their advocacy of “pro-voice” in dealing with abortion. Every woman’s voice deserves to be heard; women (in numerous political contexts) don’t need to be talked at, shamed, have numbers and percentages thrown at them as much as they need to be listened to, and told that they are loved.
Note: This how-to became quite popular, and I wanted to be clear that it is available for reposting and reuse for other campaigns, so long as you respect the Creative Commons license (Attribution non-commercial share-alike).
If you’re not on Twitter, but you’d like a helping hand through the sign-up process, go here.
If you’re new to Twitter, and want an introduction to basic concepts– retweets, hashtags, and mentions, oh my!– go here.
THE GOODS
One of the more attractive social media tactics when it comes to creating a stir is to use hashtags. Hashtags, in the case of campaigns and politics, can be useful to:
collect all the tweets about a particular topic in one place;
put pressure on public figures to respond to a topic (because of the above);
What’s a hashtag? It’s an agreed-upon keyword preceded by the pound sign that’s added to your tweet. In this case, we’re using #dearjohn. No special skill is required–just type it into your tweet, or copy and paste it.
Tweets with the #dearjohn hashtag should convey one or more of the following:
A sense of urgency about sexual assault and reproductive rights.
A personal story–storytelling is what gets to people, not isolated facts and figures.
Deep conviction. You don’t have to tell your story to be authentic, but your words should be your own.
UPDATE: Check out Sady’s newer post for content ideas and guidelines.
Consider also monitoring the #dearjohn hashtag (how to do that is explained below) and retweeting posts that you agree with. Amplifying powerful messages and diverse voices goes a long way towards building critical mass.
It’s also helpful to include the Twitter handles of people that you want to hear your message. House representatives who are sponsoring the bill should be considered first–start with @SpeakerBoehner himself. A list of the rest of the co-sponsors–all 173 of them!– can be found here (click on “Co-sponsors” under Representative Christopher Smith). You can use GovLuv to find the Twitter handles of the representative you wish to mention. Consider also sending messages of thanks to representatives who are speaking out and standing up for women in this fight. UPDATE:Amaditalks on Tumblr compiled the whole list here.
You might also think about starting (or joining an existing) an act.ly petition to collect #dearjohn tweeters in yet another online location.
A word about decency/politeness: You don’t have to be nice in your tweets when confronting folks that support HR3. But calling names, making false or libelous accusations, etc., only hurts the rest of the movement. Be outraged, but keep your head on straight.
A word about trolls: If you’re new to this kind of thing, you might not have had much experience with trolling behavior. Basically, a troll is someone who actually isn’t interested in having a productive discussion, and only posts extremely inflammatory comments to derail the entire conversation. Ignore them. Block them. Do not, repeat, do not respond in any way, shape or form–do not even tell them that you’re blocking them. Trolls are vampires: they are emboldened and strengthened by any response to their antics, and you will inevitably be weakened. I know it’s hard to ignore them. But trust me, it is the only way.
To see the running log of all #dearjohn posts, you can do a few things:
Keep coming back to this post and clicking on #dearjohn
Look at the top of your Twitter page–there’s a search box. Enter #dearjohn into it, and when you see the search results, you’ll notice a button at the top right of the results–”Save this search.” Click that. Then, to find it again, look at the top of your Timeline for the “Searches” link. Click on it, and you’ll be shown a list of your saved searches.
(Note: I’d written this for a client as a handout, and finally turned it in a post that’s a little easier to share. If you’d like to download the PDF to print, it’s right here.)
So, you’re ready to sign up for Twitter! Sometimes the signup process can be a bit daunting, so I created this short guide showing you what you need to know. Let’s get started!
Last night, my friend Nancy Goldstein asked me for some help* in tracking clicks and references in Twitter… and I thought, as I was laying out for her what I do, “man, this would be a good blog post.” Before we begin, though, let’s all repeat the first rule of Twitter: it’s not about you. It’s about the conversation. Being obsessive about ego-checking can breed an addictive, greedy ego-monster (not that I know from experience), so it’s important to remember why you’re doing this set up–not just so you can see people referring you, but also so you can monitor what’s happening in conversations that refer to things you care about.
Here are the tips I shared with Nancy:
Backtweets. Enter any URL and see who’s tweeted it, no matter what URL shortener they used. Especially handy if you don’t have access to analytics of a particular site. (RSS feed of results available)
Favstar. See who has favorited your tweets, and also new-style RT’ed your tweets. (RSS feed of results available– handy for seeing a old tweet that was recently favorited).
Advanced Twitter search. The search function at the top of Twitter home page doesn’t seem to have all of the results when referencing users. Go to http://search.twitter.com/ and enter your username preceded by the @ symbol (i.e., @randomdeanna) and hit enter. You should see results of when someone else new-style RT’s something with your username in it. (RSS feed of results available)
Other Twitter searches. I also have saved searches for deannazandt, which brings up both mistaken username mentions (people sometimes forget I’m @randomdeanna), as well links to my website, deannazandt.com. Plus a saved search for “Deanna Zandt,” when people read something I’ve written, but don’t know my twitter handle.
Got (free, easy) tips of your own? Feel free to share them in the comments!
(*UPDATE: Nancy reminded me to share with you that she is “the most selfless, confident, least ego-driven person you’ve ever met and would NEVER dream of checking my RT thread to reassure myself that people like me or are actually reading my work :)” OMG NANCY ME TOO)
Conceptually, encouraging dominant cultures to divesify is fabulous –I subscribe to the DNA model of ecosystems and social spaces, so I support it wholeheartedly. As I’ve said in my book and recent talks:
Last night I was poking around the socnets before going to bed, and saw that Beth Kanter had posted a link to Fast Company’s “Influence Project.” I’m keenly interested in ways to measure influence as part of the research fellowship I have with the Center for Social Media at American University, so naturally I was intrigued and signed up. It took me a while to suss out what they’re actually doing. While they recognize that influence isn’t about numbers of followers or fans, this is how they measure:
The scale of your influence, and therefore the size of your photo, is based on two measures.
1. The number of people who directly click on your unique URL link. This is the primary measure of your influence, pure and simple.
2. You will receive partial “credit” for subsequent clicks generated by those who register as a result of your URL. In other words, anyone who comes to the site through your link and registers for their own account will be spreading your influence while they spread theirs. That way, you get some benefit from influencing people who are influential themselves. We will give a diminishing, fractional credit (1/2, ¼, 1/8 etc ) for clicks generated up to six degrees away from your original link.
Hmmmmm.
What I find problematic: It’s still in many ways a popularity contest. Someone with a lot of time on their hands could launch a campaign to focus on generating as many clicks as possible, which would certainly skew the measurements of that person’s true influence– if they’re not actively campaigning, how much are people actually clicking on their links?
Plus there’s the problem of the power law in this case–early popular adopters are going to rise to the top faster than later adopters and benefit the most from the Amway-like pyramid scheme of click benefits.
There’s no good measurement for influence right now. Part of that’s because there’s a Pandora’s box of factors to consider. I may be influential in recommending information about social networks or dog behavior, but completely ineffectual at recommending solid information on the cultures of Lower Slobbovia. Which measure of influence is important? Do we take a mean number of some kind to represent my overall influence in the world? If we did, how much weight should my recommendations on Lower Slobbovia play?
I know people are desperate to have quantitative metrics when it comes to social media, especially when thinking about ROI. I don’t want to see us falling back on paradigms that we’re used to, though, because they’re now becoming outdated and useless. Here’s a smidge of how I address this in Share This!, from the section “Avoiding the Newest Numbers Trap” in Chapter 4:
Someday, maybe even while this book is being printed, my dream of having an application that shows me “interestingness” in the social network sphere will come true. Flickr has this for photographs: There is an algorithm based on “[w]here the click-throughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.” The best part? Interestingness itself, then, is constantly changing, based on these shifting variables, so there’s a good chance of finding both something new and something surprising when one goes spelunking through Flickr’s massive collection of interesting photos.
I’m not going to lie to you: This great shift in authority isn’t the easiest part of social networking’s brave new world to navigate. The tools give us tremendous power to change the culture around us, but they’re new, and our behavior and impressions are still based on operating within a hyper-capitalist-focused, hierarchical mindset. We have a lot of work to do on freeing our minds before the rest of our bits will follow.
Surprisingly, though, the uncertainty of the future of social networking tools is also the good news: Things are still shaking out, and we’re in a position to determine whether the reordering of authority will benefit people who previously did not have the access or the means to make their voices heard. Armed with a fundamental understanding of what’s taking place (by, ahem, reading good books on the subject), you’re primed to make the most of change.
Thanks to Facebook’s latest round of privacy silliness, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to loads of media outlets on the topic, as well as the future of social networking. Here are a few:
I hear a lot of arguments from friends about how they don’t think Foursquare could possibly be interesting or useful to their lives, and to them, I want to offer a little anecdote of awesome that just happened on my trip to San Francisco. I’m attending Web 2.0 Expo, and I started to hit the afternoon sleepytime. I pulled out my phone and went to Google Maps, found my location, and searched for “coffee.” Up came numerous cafes; the nearest was Starbucks, but I always try to find local coffee when I’m traveling. Slightly further away, past several other options, I saw Blue Bottle Cafe. I remembered from glancing at Foursquare the last few days that my friend Rod Begbie has checked into another Blue Bottle location near his office, and has remarked on how much he loves the coffee. The answer was clear.
Foursquare, in this case, doesn’t help me find my friends, or alert anyone to my whereabouts, or give me a snazzy badge. Through my ambient awareness of Rod’s check-ins, I knew where I could go to get what I needed without having to ask anyone, or pour through online reviews by strangers.
And my decaf Americano was damn good*.
–
*Yes, I drink decaf, even when I have the afternoon sleepies. The taste and the smell of coffee do a little bit to perk me back up. :-)
I’m pleased as punch to be speaking at this conference/show next week — should be a rollicking good time, with a stellar lineup of really interesting speakers. I’ll be talking about what dissent, muckraking and diversity really mean for the businesses of the future, which has been a nice challenge for me to write. Video clips will be posted once I have them!
