Social Media and Networking

The Web 2.0 Pivot

April 11, 2011 by Ted Fickes

Indian Gulch Fire 008 — Indian Gulch Fire (City of Golden photo).

During the Indian Gulch Fire near my community of Golden, Colorado several weeks ago (where I serve as the mayor), one of my City Council colleagues and I found ourselves focused primarily on gathering information about what was happening, sharing the information in a bunch of different ways (including Facebook and Twitter), and listening closely out on the ground and via social media to what our community members were asking and what they were concerned about (so that we could respond to all of that). (I posted more about the specifics of the lessons learned during the Indian Gulch fire on my mayor’s blog.

We weren’t officially representing the city while we were doing this, but by virtue of our roles in the community we had credibility and a lot of folks relied partly on our communication to stay on top of the fire and the evacuation situation. We were both (naturally) very plugged in to what was happening, and we used discretion when we weren’t certain of the facts or where sensitive information was in play, but it was entirely outside the formal command structure and communications system, and it created some consternation within that system that the mayor and a city councilor were engaged in so much independent communication.

This probably sounds like a familiar story. In fact, any organization that is struggling with the pivot to a Web 2.0 world will find itself grappling with these very same types of challenges: how do you maintain the accuracy of information when the flow is dispersed, how do you control the message when everyone has the means to alter it or even challenge it, how do you deploy your communication resources when the information flow far exceeds any capacity you will ever have to manage it, and how do you manage independent communication by people who are part of your own team?

In the case of an emergency response system, unlike most nonprofit environments, there is still a need for an unchallenged command-and-control decision process. Incident commanders need to make big picture decisions that they know will be implemented down through the vertical hierarchy, just as folks down that command chain have to know that their decisions will be implemented as well.

But the part of all this that involves communication and information flow lives outside of this command-and-control chain regardless of how hard the incident commanders work to contain it, and that’s why this is such a familiar-sounding story. (The Emergency Management blog has an interesting post about these challenges from the perspective of the emergency responders.)

The answer doesn’t reduce to adding your social networks to your press release distribution list (although that may be better than nothing). As Beth Kanter and Allison Fine argue in The Networked Nonprofit, you canâ€™t simply layer a social media strategy on top of an organization whose modus operandi is largely defined by deep organizational hierarchies and one-way communication between the organization and its members. Your organization needs to be willing to adopt a â€œsocial cultureâ€ emphasizing two way communication and conversation with people inside and outside the organization, an openness to trying and learning from new approaches, and staff autonomy and agility.

In fact, some of the most important lessons we drew from our experience during the fire in Golden are the same sorts of lessons that nonprofit folks are drawing all the time now as they grapple with social networking:

Our social networking communication efforts didn’t replace face-to-face communication but supplemented and amplified it. In fact, our effective use of social networking depended on a lot of face time.
Our social networking efforts took a lot of time and effort. There are certainly ways to streamline, but there’s no getting around the fact that doing it well requires a real investment.
Most people seemed very plugged in to only one or two communication channels, which meant that using a wide range of channels was pretty important. For some, the traditional media channels were the most important, while for others it was Facebook or Twitter. Know your audience, and recognize that they may be diverse in which information channels they rely on.
The listening was as important as pushing information out. By listening carefully to the conversations on social networks and elsewhere on the web, we were able to identify questions and concerns and respond to them quickly. Similarly, we were able to catch inaccurate information and to notice what rumors were starting to gather steam so we could address them directly.
The social networking conversations were amplified considerably by the network participants themselves. Tweets were retreated, blog post links were shared, email newsletters were forwarded, and so on. Our communication efforts really did end up being a shared, community undertaking.
There is no longer any simple way to control the accuracy of the information (or to control the information at all). For nonprofits accustomed to ensuring that information out there in the world about their organizations is accurate and flattering, this is a tough transition but it’s happening whether they resist or embrace. Consumers, donors, and clients now control information flow and organizational reputations in new and potent ways.
Finally, people want to feel like they are in the loop. This desire is dramatically heightened during a crisis, but that instinct is there all of the time. This is part of why the organizations that use social networking tools effectively use them, in part, to pull back the curtain and give their supporters a more transparent, behind-the-scenes understanding of the work they do. People – be they constituents, consumers, donors, or clients – are more likely to be constructively engaged if you help empower them with accurate information in authentic and candid ways. The tools themselves aren’t really the point.

For the most nimble and cutting-edge social sector organizations, this is easy. In fact, they are already fully inhabiting a Web 2.0 world, using social networking tools to engage, empower, and collaborate with their supporters. For everyone else, change is hard (as Dan Health likes to say).

Bridging Cultures Within Nonprofit Organizations

April 6, 2011 by Ted Fickes

Bridge over Tagus river, Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by flickr user F H Mira.

I’m a fan of Ethan Zuckerman’s research on bridging across cultures and the ways in which our communication and networking systems can either encourage interactions across cultural divides or impede them. But what happens when the cultural bridging that needs to happen is within a single organization?

Here’s a scenario:

A nonprofit has a team of folks who focus on technology, the web, social media, and perhaps even a mobile strategy. Those folks are smart, committed, and capable, and they come up with great ideas for deploying the tools and technologies, but the organizational decision-makers nix the ideas one after another. The easy explanation is that the folks in positions of authority are too old school, or too conventional, or too set in their 20th century ways. Communication channels that we don’t control! Letting other people talk about us – say whatever they want! – on our own website? Giving up control over the message?

No doubt this sort of risk intolerance, command and control mentality, and generational divide are all part of the problem sometimes. But I wonder if sometimes that’s just too convenient of an answer. After all, if that’s the explanation, then there isn’t much you can do about it. But I wonder if, at least sometimes, the answer has as much to do with the political savvy of the techies and with the depth of the cultural divide that separates them from others in their organizations. Even with good, dedicated activists on both sides of that conversation, if the techies don’t understand the politics of direction-shifting within their organization, or if they aren’t able to effectively explain their vision and its value even when they do understand the politics, they are going to get stuck – great ideas and no ability to implement. And that sounds very much like the sort of bridging problem that Ethan describes.

If this diagnosis is right at least some of the time, the remedy may look a lot like the sort of remedy that Ethan describes: people who bridge those two cultures (i.e., people who get both the techie world and the world of internal nonprofit politics), and communication and social structures that foster unexpectedly delightful interactions between folks on both sides of that divide. I don’t much care for the thought of adding more layers, especially within the larger nonprofits that often seem overly layered already, but if improving internal organizational dynamics and the willingness of those organizations to evolve and experiment is tied to people who can help bridge intra-organizational cultural differences, it might well be worthwhile.

Praying for Filter Failure

March 10, 2011 by Ted Fickes

Nicholas Carr over at the Rough Type blog (really worthwhile blog, btw) argued yesterday that our information overload problem isn’t a filter failure problem (i.e., too much noise and not enough signal) but a signal problem (i.e., our filters are so good they are overloading us with signal).

Carr’s argument, in a nutshell: our filtering tools are good enough that finding a needle in a haystack, where there’s a body of information and we need something specific (“situational information overload”) isn’t a problem. The problem, he argues, is experiencing overload because we are surrounded by too much information we are immediately interested in (“ambient overload”), and that this is the result of the filters being so effective at eliminating noise that they overload us with signal.

I think he got some of it wrong and some of it right. His distinction between situational and ambient overload is pretty interesting and useful, and I think is analysis of situational overload is all right, but I disagree with his assessment of our filtering tools. I don’t think they are all that sophisticated, in fact. Our filtering tools work fine for simple searches, which is what he seems to be talking about. You can pretty easily find the relevant court cases on an issue or point of law, for example, find relevant web pages through Google or Bing for a specific set of search terms, watch a conversation on Twitter around specific hashtags, or track a specific group of people’s Facebook posts.

But complex filtering is another matter altogether. For instance, if you are working on community decision-making process design and want to use search and filter tools to track information and conversations from other design fields that bear on the challenge, good luck to you. Â Within narrow, tightly defined universes, fine, but start crossing universes and the tools quickly get sloppy.

And I think he’s totally wrong about ambient overload. Â It’s not that I think there isn’t a too-much-signal problem – I like that part of his analysis – but there is also a too-much-noise problem. Â Ambient is almost the same as noise by definition, with plenty of signal but even more noise. Â Most of what passes on my Facebook stream – ambient by his definition – is noise, with bits of signal mixed in. Â Don’t care about that, don’t care about that, don’t care about that, not that either, oh wait that’s cool. Â But it’s seductive, that stream, and I want to keep watching, waiting for a hit of something worthwhile. Â For Facebook to be really useful to me, I do need better filters that can figure out what sorts of info I’m actually interested in and block out the rest.

Facebook actually just took a stab at this but with characteristically poor execution. Their approach (only show you wall posts by people you interact with on Facebook) created a self-reinforcing feedback loop that doesn’t distinguish on the basis of information quality at all, and in fact makes it really difficult to ever encounter the serendipitous surprises that make Facebook delightful at times. (You can turn this feature off, thankfully). Ditto on Twitter, RSS, actual news feeds, my email inbox, and so on. Maybe the signal:noise ratio is better with ambient, but it’s a mistake to presume that means the problem is one of too much signal.

I think one problem may be that his notion of filters is too simplistic, and those sorts of filters probably can’t solve the overload problem very well. Â The very rich idea of curation is pretty helpful here . . . it’s not so much filtering that we need but information curation to help us see the stuff we most need to see and help us understand its relationship to other information. Better automated curation tools might help a lot, but in the meantime I don’t think there’s any way around the critical role of human curation. I don’t mind that at all, and finding and sharing the most important conversations and innovations on decision design and support is a growing part of what I do at PlaceMatters. It’s also part of why I so enjoy finding others who are particularly good at information curation, since that’s a critical tool for making sure we learn from ideas across sectors. But it’s solving a noise problem, not a signal problem.

Finally, his analysis entirely overlooks what I think is a particularly critical element in intelligently and joyfully managing information and content: mechanisms that facilitate serendipity, unexpected but high-value information you would not have found otherwise. Â Curation can be a powerful strategy for embedding this, just as good design can.

Overload is obviously a problem, and incremental improvements in filtering tools probably can’t keep up with the exponential increase in information flows. But I suspect the answer really does lie in the evolution of filtering as a concept (and then the tools that follow) rather than in “prayi[ng] for filter failure.”

What Gladwell Got Right

February 13, 2011 by Ted Fickes

Malcolm Gladwellâ€™s latest critique of social networking sparked an energetic response in the social networking-o-sphere, just as his October article did. And his critics are largely right.

Yup, he is missing the point that weak tie relationships can become strong tie relationships.

Yes, he is confusing the question of â€˜why people protestâ€™ with the question of â€˜how.â€™

Indeed, he seems to misunderstand the relevance of decentralized control over the production of media and the distribution of information.

Yes, he continues to attack the least interesting and straw man-est argument that social networking caused the Egyptian revolution. Of course it didnâ€™t. â€œSocial media arenâ€™t causing revolutions,â€ as blogger Allison Fine puts it, â€œthey are aiding them.â€

And, as Ethan Zuckerman suggests, Gladwell missed the most important question altogether: â€œI think the interesting story to watch will be whether social media can help Egypt in the transition to democracy.â€

But I think his ongoing critique of social networking does (obliquely) illuminate the biggest weakness in the social-media-for-advocacy universe: the lack of clarity about the mechanisms of change underlying the use of social networking tools.

Most of the writing (including Beth Kanterâ€™s and Allison Fineâ€™s terrific book, â€œThe Networked Nonprofitâ€) seems rooted in the presumption that engagement through social networking tools is a good thing and will enable or enhance whatever social change goals are in your queue. The mechanism, such as it is, usually reduces to:

more weak tie engagement using social networking tools => more strong tie engagement using social networking tools => more ability to do whatever it is you do

This might be true in the most general of ways, but itâ€™s not very useful for crafting an effective outcome-oriented strategy, especially if you are working with limited resources (i.e., nearly always). It may be that the most effective strategy really does amount to igniting high-volume protests. Kanterâ€™s impressive effort to pressure Apple into making nonprofit donation tools available on the iPhone might fit into this model. Get enough people talking enough about it and you might be able to leverage some high-profile media coverage. And you might then be able to leverage the coverage into effective market pressure.

But if Iâ€™m trying to persuade my City Council to adopt historic neighborhood protections, thousands of Facebook messages from people who donâ€™t live in my town probably isnâ€™t going to be very effective (in fact, they might even have the opposite effect, since what elected representative wants to look like they are responding to pressure from outside their community?). The most effective voices may be the residents and property owners in those specific neighborhoods, so the winning strategy may really be about persuading a very small number of people to get involved in very direct ways. If you want to persuade the Member of Congress from western Colorado (whomever it might be at the time) to support a wilderness bill, direct expressions of support from a small number of Colorado opinion leaders among ranching and farming constituencies are likely to be much more effective than a large number of comments from across Colorado and the country.

The savvier social networking evangelists in the nonprofit world do a good job of highlighting the importance of having clear goals before launching a social networking strategy. Clarity about whether you are more focused on reach or on high levels of engagement, for instance, will have a significant impact on what you do. The next step, though, is to extend that sort of thinking a few steps further back: exactly what social change or community value outcomes are you aiming for, what exactly needs to happen to accomplish those goals, and then how exactly can a social networking strategy help you get there.

Thereâ€™s no one right way to do this. A campaign-focused organizing strategy that identifies the individual decision-makers of consequence can work well, just as the more abstract â€œtheory of changeâ€ or â€œlogic modelâ€ approach that some funders emphasize. But absent some clear understanding of what must happen, exactly, to produce the targeted outcomes, then social networking may or may not have any meaningful impact. And I think itâ€™s safe to say that it wonâ€™t have as much impact as it could.

The main value of Gladwellâ€™s continued critique (which has, ironically, been propelled far more widely because of social media than it would have been otherwise) has been to catalyze a reinvigorated discussion about the value of social networking in social movements. Perhaps it will also help drive a touch more rigor in our thinking about how to use these tools most effectively.

Can Social Networks Create Social Capital?

January 11, 2011 by Ted Fickes

In September, 2008, Green for All, 1Sky and the We Campaign organized a national day of action — Green Jobs Now — to demand progress on green jobs and a green economy. Tens of thousands of people participated in over 670 events in 40 states. Staff led on-the-ground efforts in just a handful of key cities, while the majority of actions were organized online and offline by activists and other citizens -â€“ volunteers, by and large.

The green jobs day of action was large, strong, and helped set the tone nationally on a key topic in an upcoming election. Discussions about green jobs and green economy policies occurred from local to national levels. Many engaged in those events have continued to be involved in the issue, if not the organization, and some have taken up leadership roles locally or even nationally. Green for All developed a long-term program of on the ground activities to continue engaging participants — and attract new ones.

Online networks were used to help organize the national day of action but the action was not about “likes” or fans or messages. While the online networks may have taken off in terms of size and activity, is that where the power of this day of action was rooted? Or was power based in the individual relationships offline and online, many of which continued to grow and strengthen after this day?

A challenge of our time seems to be building networks of quantity while creating/generating quality from the networks. Planning, reporting, and strategic systems put a priority on numbers instead of narrative. We have two year (or shorter) program cycles that reward immediate, impersonal action instead of relationships.

Online networks have transferred the tools of organizing and programmatic leadership from organizations and placed them into the hands of the citizen/member. Meanwhile, organizations typically approach social networks as a staff-driven, top-down push towards higher numbers of fans, friends, and followers.

Contacts, Connections and Social Capital

Social networks and email lists are built with contacts: email addresses and spur of the moment expressions of interest. Connections are longer-term relationships built on commonalities of interest, geography, conversation and exploration of ideas, place, and trust. The difference between contacts and connections is a central theme in Robert Putnam’s look at social disconnect and the breakdown of American civil society, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, 2000.

Putnam describes social connections as fabric that, when woven, creates social capital in organizations and societies. Social capital is tangible and malleable. It can be organized and brought to bear upon a situation. One’s amount of social capital can be measured and, when spent, its value can be assessed.

Social contacts are more ethereal, less tangible — almost hypothetical. These are people who have met but do not necessarily know one another. Many are connected only randomly. They may be able to broadcast the events of their day to one another but not ask a personal favor or base a decision on the advice of one another.

Build Social Capital

Many organizations approach social media as a numbers game. Larger numbers of friends/fans/followers indicate strength. Unfortunately, this overlooks the value of real social capital: without organizing and relationship building, social networks are not powerful.

One thing often forgotten when organizations build social networks and make plans to “use” these networks (be it for advocacy, for fundraising, or just to drive traffic to their website — maybe the most common if least helpful use of the network) is the first word: Social

Think about your own, personal, use of Facebook and Twitter. It’s not about the “network”. It is probably not, even for those of us immersed in these issues, about the cause or the politics, either. It is about the social, the personal interaction, the catching up with and hearing from friends.

Alissa Hauser and Marianne Manilov talk about how small, core networks spring up around social needs, not politics or cause. Groups with political and social change goals are stronger and more viable over time when there are opportunities of personal interaction, relationship and trust-building, and sharing stories. Bari Samad, Internet Director at Green for All, characterized it well in a recent conversation. “We have a predisposition to assume that people always want to be activists, and bypass the critical steps of engaging them in conversations and meeting them where they already are,” he said when talking about how many organizations view existing or potential new constituents.

In fact, the bar for activism is higher. Activism: the word itself denotes action. Action takes time. Action that is unplanned or lacking goals and practice often produces unexpected and disappointing results. Time and resources are needed to create more valuable actions — and more productive activists.

Organization are leaving value on the table by not building relationships and opportunities for real, personal, engagement between people and organizations around issues of common concern.

Green for All and others in the Green Jobs Now campaign are, like many organizations (but still too few), providing examples of ways to view online networks as a tool for creating and strengthening long-term power-development in social change campaigns and movements. The networks connect people — allow for interaction — and serve as a jumping off point for building strong relationships.

We hope to explore these jumping off points and look at how to create programs that draw real strength from communities and networks in a session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in March.