I’m really psyched to announce that in partnership with my speaking agency, Aid & Abet, I’m launching a series of boot camps across the country. Our pilot is in San Francisco on March 5, 2012:
You know about social media. You know that you’ve got to get on board with it for your organization, or for your own activist work. You may have even signed up for Twitter or Facebook already, but you don’t know where to start. What are the right tools to use? What do I say? Why are other people doing this? And, perhaps, most importantly: how the hell do I know if it’s working?!
View the full event page for the whole description and pricing information, and to register. We’re also offering scholarships for those in need.
WE ARE GOING TO HAVE SO MUCH FUN.
Oh, and speaking of need, I should mention how this idea came about– a lot of people come to Jen Angel (of Aid & Abet) and I looking for a hands-on workshop, but can’t afford to bring me into their organization or event. This workshop will get folks who need it the most, working on the front lines, the skills they need without emptying their budgets.
Based on how things go in SF, I’ll be offering this boot camp in other cities (likely next up will be NYC and DC), and possibly online. If you’re interested helping to host one in other cities, please let us know– leave a comment below or send me an email. And, if you’re interested in bringing me to your organization for a group training or strategy session, drop Jen a line.
Increasingly, I’m getting mentions from people with whom I’m not familiar, asking to click on links to their work. I see this happening to my friends, too, so I thought I’d collect and share my responses to one Twitter user on why this doesn’t work that well.
This isn’t a criticism of anyone’s projects– I’m sure they’re fabulous! — but rather an offer of help on how to get people to look at stuff.
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.@gbedard1 ok, time for some free advice. People pay thousands for this (or they just buy my book, haha), so take notes:
UPDATE: I got a little swipe about my ego being too big to click on links. Granted, my ego is ginormous (ask anyone who knows me intimately offline), but for once, it doesn’t have much to do with the situation at hand. I’m just explaining here how important the relationship mechanism is for sharing information– it’s called “social” media for a reason. Tee hee.
I’m concerned about some initial sociologial (versus technological) trends I’m seeing on Google+. Admittedly, I haven’t played around with it too much — I still like Twitter and Facebook, since people with whom I have high-value relationships participate heavily there. Google+ is more a novelty (and a necessity for me to figure out for my clients). And frankly, while I know lots of people love the Circles — for the non-Google+-er, those are groups in which you have to put people — I’m overwhelmed by having to choose where I want to put every single person in whom I have some semblence of interest. The implications of Circles could be a whole ‘nother post, so I’ll leave it at that.
What I’ve found troublesome so far is that the atmosphere/culture Google+ has far less “personality” than the other services do. I don’t see as much intimate content there (yet?) as I do other services. And the intimate content that is posted there doesn’t seem to resonate as much with readers.
In case you’ll be at SXSW Interactive this weekend, and in case you want to see me and some pretty amazing folks doing some killer speaking and workshopping… Monday is the Day o’ DZ:
Monday, 9:30am. Hyatt TX Ballroom 1. The best donuts you’ve ever had in your life will be served! People Power: Leveraging Personal Stories to Build Influence. http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7037
With: Twanna Hines, Jean Russell, Cheryl Contee and Andrea Miller.
Now, social is personal. From finance site Mint.com’s anti-immigration blog post gaffe to YourTango CEO Andrea Miller’s “How to Date an Indian (Advice for the Non-Indian),” social media fuses personal with public in a way never seen before. Whether sharing taste in hiphop, dating preferences, provocative political ideas, or insider information about a soon-to-be-launched business, social media strategically develops personal and professional reputations. Stories can build audiences, grow support for campaigns and change mainstream ideas about social issues. They can also alienate various communities, compromise business information confidentiality or damage brands. If social media has shown us anything, it’s that stories still matter. This panel will be a concrete conversation on how successful online personalities have managed their personal and professional lives using social media: telling authentic stories about our experiences, and using those stories to build powerful, engaged communities.
Monday, 12:30pm. Icehauers, 83 Rainey St. Twitter for Good at SXSW and Beyond http://claire.us.com/twitter-for-good-at-sxsw-and-beyond/
The lovely Claire Diaz Ortiz, who leads philanthropy and social innovation at Twitter, is hosting this lunchtime discussion and workshop to answer the question: “What 1 THING could Twitter, Inc. do to better help non-profits, causes, and anyone trying to make a difference in the world using the platform?” More details at Claire’s blog post.
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.
We’ve been together a long time. I still remember so clearly holding my shiny red Pearl in my hands for the first time. It glistened with promise, way back then. It was the summer of 2007.
I was a late adopter (to my fellow geeks, anyway) for a smartphone. For the longest time, I kept my Type-A-like behavior in the digital world in check by not having a device that I could get email on, or surf around on. Finally I caved, and I was thrilled with my little guy. It did everything I needed. A little over a year later, I decided it was time to move on to something bigger, and I bought a Blackberry Bold the day they came out in late 2008.
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.
We’ve been together a long time. I still remember so clearly holding my shiny red Pearl in my hands for the first time. It glistened with promise, way back then. It was the summer of 2007.
