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The power of suggestion

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On Friday last week Twitter added a collection of non-profit accounts to their Suggested Users list, seeming to focus on social entrepreneurship, including both organizations and individuals. These new Suggested Users included:

This was met with general acclaim in the non-profit blogosphere. Nathaniel Whittemore, Change.org's Social Entrepreneurship blogger, went so far as to suggest that a listing could be worth $1 million.

On Tuesday a second set of non-profits were added to the list, this time including @AshokaTweets, which I run, and Ashoka's @Changemakers. Since then we've added over 10,000 new followers each.

The rate of increase really is quite amazing. I had worked diligently since January building an engaged community of 6,500,  sustained participation leading to consistent, organic growth. When I realized what was happening by Wednesday late morning we where already over 10,000. As of this writing, late Thursday evening, we have passed 17,000.

This gives rise to several thoughts.

As exciting as the growing count is these new followers are clearly less valuable in purely business terms than those who found us because they are overtly interested in Ashoka, social entrepreneurship, or social change. These original followers are self-consciously interested in what we have to say, and a decent number of them will check out articles or vote in competitions on our suggestion. In other words, they're engaged.

These new followers, on the other hand, have agreed to kick off their twitter experience by following a wildly diverse group of 300ish Suggestions Users, including a preponderance of celebrities and sports people but also twitter developers, journalists and newspapers, blogs and bloggers, online and offline businesses, business and social entrepreneurs. They may or may not be interested in what we have to say, they haven't consciously chosen to follow us, they just want to be following someone, and Twitters suggestions will do.

Equally, this group of new users are probably those mostly likely to quite twitter quickly. In February it was reported that 60% of twitter users quit within a month. As many as a third who get so far as to send a tweet never make it to their second. People who join twitter without a clear idea of what they want to get out of it, what sort of information they want to plug into, are probably those most likely to quit. So it seems inevitable that we will end up with many thousands of abandoned accounts padding our follower count.

But this is all really besides the point. Regardless of how many of our followers are no longer checking twitter there will be many, hopefully more, who are. And even if the majority of new followers are not currently focused on social entrepreneurship, some will be, and some will discover a new interest or passion.

This, indeed, is the ultimate opportunity for a citizen sector organization of placement on the Suggested Users list. Non-profits are always discussing how we can stop "preaching to the converted" and escape our silo. Well here's the chance, tens of thousands of people who don't yet know about your organization or cause but who, with good messaging and sustained effort, can be inspired to be your next generation of supporters, new members of your movement, the boost you need to reach a tipping point of awareness around an issue. In other words it is the fact that they didn't go looking for us that gives these new connections a different, and unique, value.

Ashoka's mission is to create an Everyone a Changemaker world, a world where everyone has the support and skills to create change in their community. Such a mission requires that we seek out opportunities to reach a wider audience and being added to the twitter Suggested Users list is an amazing opportunity to speak to larger, wider, more diverse audience and inspire them to imagine the future they would like to create, and then to take action to bring it about.

Thanks twitter!

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Ashoka at the Clinton Global Initiative

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I was laid up with a bad back all of last week and while I was it was very cool to see all the videos produced by the Ashoka Team at the Clinton Global Initiative.  The increasing use of video at Ashoka, and at citizen sector organizations overall, is wonderful to see. A year ago Ashoka's approach to video was very traditional - footage would be shot and, time-permitting, edited into something usable. Now the focus is on fast, one-take, minimally edited videos that can be shared live or very rapidly with our online audience. It's our immersion into social media that inspires this new approach - being involved in a real-time conversation with our supporters and peers creates an emphasis on timeliness and humanness. To this end people from different parts of the Ashoka family where profiled at CGI: Fellows, staff and supporters. It was the first-time we've emphasized video as a reporting tool from a live event like this. We have learnt a lot from this pilot and will be using this learning to better cover future events, including our Tech 4 Society conference in Hyderabad India in February next year, one of the biggest gatherings we have hosted.

These learnings include improved coordination between the production of videos and the conversation at and about the event. For instance, if we see an Ashoka Fellow or staff member saying something interesting or profound over their twitter feed we should try and grab them as soon as possible and get them to expand on those thoughts on video. This would more powerfully embed our videos into the conversation, rather than just using the twitter conversation as just an outreach platform.

The ongoing development of Ashoka's online communities and the clear interest and enthusiasm for stories from the Ashoka network has inspired this greater focus on developing timely content that can be shared with these communities. The understanding of the importance and benefits of this approach is becoming widespread across the organization, such that it barely requires me to suggest let alone implement these efforts. And that, to me, is the most exciting thing of all, evidence of the real culture-change taking place at Ashoka as we become more social, more participatory and more focused on storytelling.

Here are a couple of my favourite of our videos from CGI:

Ashoka Fellow Harmish Hande:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k5AKpQpFg8]

And a super-cute video with my boss, head of Global Marketing Beverly Schwartz:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C69ftNBi-A]

You can see all the Ashoka CGI videos here.

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Attitudinal barriers to social media success

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I was on a panel at a Social Media for Social Good event recently and a question posted was: what are mistakes people make with social media? I didn't have any spectacular "misses" to relate, as Ashoka is relatively new to Social Media and progressing carefully, not trying anything too radical that would constitute a "miss". But thinking about the question I realized that the main misses from social media are not from trying things that go spectacularly wrong but from not trying things at all. The miss is missed opportunity, a squandering of the chance social media provides to speak with your supporters, partners and friends in new ways, collaborate with and involve them to an extent previously impossible.

This echos what was discussed towards the end of the last #4change chat, that most non-profits are not there yet when it comes to social media, a number of barriers from the attitudional 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 (which I was lucky enough to be present for): 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.

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Ashoka's first eBook - Stories of Change: Fellows and their Journeys

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I just hit upload on the first of a new series of eBooks I've been working on at Ashoka. I've wanted for some time to profile the amazing stories in the Ashoka network in new and shareable ways and eBooks are a fun and stylish way to do that. Using Scribd as our primary platform the document can be embedded and read anywhere, as below, kinda like a YouTube for documents and publications. Ashoka has been getting more social lately but this project is about putting the media in our social media strategy. If we want other people to generate content about us on social media platforms we need to generate more content ourselves, and let people interact with that content. I hope you enjoy this first attempt and I'd love any feedback you have!

[scribd id=18984420 key=key-10d36bmg9zcm2qiukzs4]

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#4change wrap-up: collaboration and social media

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I've been meaning to write a wrap-up of the #4change chat on collaboration for the week since it happened. My apologies for the delay, I'm still getting into the routine of blogging and Burning Man preparation has completely taken over ever available hour outside of work and a necessary minimum of socializing. I'll tell you all about it before I depart – in a week! Anyway....

Thank you to @lethalsheethal for her excellent and vastly more timely reflection on the chat. Having just discovered it I'd like to recommend 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 3rd 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.”

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

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#4Change Twitter chat tomorrow

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4change logo #4Change is a twitter-based real-time conversation about how social media can be used for change. It was an idea which bounced around for a bit before a group of friends and contacts from three countries kicked it off a couple of months ago. Tomorrow will be our third chat.

Rather than introduce the next chat I'm going to use my friend Amy's overview for the 4Change group blog, of which I am a part, as I couldn't possibly do a better job.

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

Details:

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!