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News for December 2009
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 30 December 2009 |
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| What Works in Social Change? |
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For his doctoral research, Scott Sherman investigated 120 factors that might be linked to failure or success of social change strategies. In What Works in Social Change?, he seeded a conversation at Social Edge with what he learned. He saw three principles at work: (1) Exposing injustice. (2) "Social Aikido". (3) The constructive program. Simple, it's true, but powerful: Problem + Solution + Cleverness = Social Change.
Posted: 12/30/09; 10:14:30 AM # |
| Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 |
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The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has compiled the recommendation of a few hundred professionals into a list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009. Obviously "top" here means "popular", but this is still a good way to catch up on the tools that learning professionals thought were interesting.
Posted: 12/30/09; 10:06:52 AM # |
| Evidence-Based Tools for a Culture of Nonviolence |
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PeacePower's compendium of Evidence-Based Tools for a Culture of Nonviolence is a fantastic resource. At first, it looks pretty simple, with just four main ideas: (1) Recognize Contributions and Successes, (2) Act with Respect, (3) Share Power to Build Community, and (4) Make Peace. But click through on each of these and you'll find an array of well-developed tools, explained in short PDFs. This is under development, with the first two categories much further along. Still, if you're looking to develop a culture of constructive and creative conflict resolution in your organization, then I highly recommend this resource.
Posted: 12/30/09; 10:03:42 AM # |
| The Journalist-Organizer |
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I've written and spoken a lot about the resurgence of community organizing in the age of new media and the importance of community organizing as a frame of reference for 21st century communication. Keith Hammonds takes this a step further and describes organizing as a key element of journalism in the coming years. It pained me to realize that the first thing I thought of when I read the title of his piece was Fox News's role in organizing several right-wing public rallies, to which they then in turn devoted enormous press coverage. In The Journalist-Organizer, Hammonds profiles a very different model in the form of Kara Andrade of Guatamala. He sees in her a journalist who expands the notions of their profession by enabling conversations and building connections.
Posted: 12/30/09; 9:48:39 AM # |
| 5 Steps to Building Social Experiences |
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Everyone is talking "social" these days and that's only going to continue in 2010. But most of the time, as with so many other past communication trends, the new ideas don't penetrate very deeply. Perhaps social media are seen as list-building ideas, completely in service to traditional broadcast. Or they are a kind of "bolted on" innovation: A new doodad to make us feel contemporary, rather than something actually transformative. So, it's with some pleasure that I read articles like Erin Malone's 5 Steps to Building Social Experiences, where some of the essential aspects of what makes something "social" are taken seriously. Although I think they are a bit narrow, her five steps are all smart advice: (1) What's your social object? Make sure there is a "there" there. Give users a reason to rally. Why would someone come to your site? (2) Give people a way to identify themselves and to be identified. (3) Give people something to do. (4) Enable a bridge to real life (groups, mobile, meetings, face-to-face). (5) Gently Moderate. Let the community elevate people and content they value.
Posted: 12/30/09; 9:37:16 AM # |
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17 December 2009 |
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| Bolivia's Next Steps: The Role of Civil Society |
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I am absolutely fascinated by the peaceful transformation going on in Bolivia. In Bolivia's Next Steps, Benjamin Dangl paints a picture of the momentum that real change has there, following the most recent landslide re-election of Evo Morales and his party. The key element that stands out is how, whether it's about policy or organizing, the movement is deeply based in civil society. I can't help but contrast this to the situation in the U.S., where Obama was the favored candidate in most circles of civil society, but doesn't remotely govern as such because our sector is largely co-opted. In Bolivia, community organizations, unions, and the other organizations of civil society are at the center of the movement for change.
Posted: 12/17/09; 5:46:45 PM # |
| Educational Technology Debate |
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The Educational Technology Debate is focusing on lessons learned from the One Laptop Per Child project. OLPC always struck me as distinctly non-systems savvy and the insights from the conversation bear that out. Hardware alone is not transformative.
Posted: 12/17/09; 5:39:09 PM # |
| The Ballast Concept, A Blog by Ashley Cummings |
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If I'm not mistaken, Ashley Cummings is another finalist in Askoka's Hyderabad Challenge. (Really, blogging a conference is inherently a network-centric, peer-based project. It would be a pleasure to be working with the other finalists, rather than competing with them.) Her blog is entitled The Ballast Concept and I definitely recommend it. Among recent posts, I encourage you to check out "Invest in The People Who Really Know", in which she draws the critical distinction between amplifying the voices of people directly involved in issues and actually empowering them.
Posted: 12/17/09; 5:35:59 PM # |
| Amy Sample Ward's Version of NPTech |
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As a result of participating in Ashoka's invitation to bloggers to compete for the chance to donate our time to be the official blogger for their upcoming conference in Hyderabad, I'm getting to know some very thoughtful writers and thinkers among other finalists for the gig. (Yeah, I know this is an odd thing to compete for, but since I have often covered conferences on behalf of Nonprofit Online News, this seemed like a good fit.) One of the other finalists is Amy Sample Ward, whose blog is a gem. I particularly enjoy her short collections of items in her regular "great reads" posts.
Posted: 12/17/09; 5:27:17 PM # |
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15 December 2009 |
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7 December 2009 |
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| Participatory Communication: A Practical Guide |
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Given its role in the destruction of local, independent economies around the world, it sometimes amazes me how much good material for organizers and communications is published by the World Bank. Participatory Communication: A Practical Guide (62 page PDF, not searchable), by Thomas Tufte and Paulo Mefalopulos, is a great example. I think we're seeing an eventual convergence of communications practices emerging from work in developing nations, which are increasingly emphasizing participation, and the practices that are being shaped in those parts of the world that are most affected by the participatory forces of social media. This will be very interesting.
In the meantime, we need to have one foot in both worlds in order to truly understand what participation means. This guide is a valuable resource in that regard. It's my favorite recipe: a solid combination of theory and practice. The authors lay out a four phase model of communication, with a clearly developed role for the media, a multi-track framework of activities, and three well-developed case studies with lessons learned.
Posted: 12/7/09; 5:43:33 PM # |
| Beware Social Media Snake Oil |
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As someone who is often regarded as an "expert" in my fields, I will confess some confusion as to exactly what that means. Is my expertise enhanced or diminished by the extent to which my ideas conform to conventional wisdom? If I pride myself on asking the right questions, does that fly in the face of the idea that experts are people with answers? What if I want to empower and help organize the often latent expertise of my clients? And what's the deal with all these "experts" whose ideas are nothing but endless tips, with no coherence at all?
I'm not sure any of these questions are answered in Stephen Baker's Beware Social Media Snake Oil, but he does address how utterly baffled and discouraged I am by the sheer number of "social media" experts out there, who are coasting on the hype and anxiety of the field. Indeed, this is one of the major results of the "promotion-through-anxiety" that has permeated our sector with each successive wave of ICT innovation. Here's hoping for a little more caution.
Posted: 12/7/09; 5:22:08 PM # |
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3 December 2009 |
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| Two Minute Highlight Video from Successful Social Marketing for Nonprofits |
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We're starting to make some content from our seminars available more freely. We're starting today with a piece that explains the role of density of connections between stakeholders in the success of social media messaging. Go to the page for our seminar on Successful Social Marketing for Nonprofits and click on the video image on the right. (For now, you'll probably need either Quicktime or VLC, since that's the tech we use in our broadcasts.) Using the unfortunate metaphor of a forest fire, this is one of my favorite visual demonstrations. Nonprofits invest way more in their messages than in their networks, but it's the latter that makes all the difference!
Posted: 12/3/09; 4:57:40 PM # |
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2 December 2009 |
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| Impact of Human Activity Patterns on the Dynamics of Information Diffusion |
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Chances are good that you have some kind of mental model of how social or viral marketing works. You have a concept in mind when you say to your team that you want a message to "go viral" or you label a campaign as itself viral. As with so many practices, it's good to make our mental models explicit. Explicit models get everyone on the same page, allow us to test our assumptions about cause and effect, and lead to improvements in the models themselves. They make us more effective.
In Physical Review Letters, Jose Luis Iribarren and Esteban Moro have published a paper entitled Impact of Human Activity Patterns on the Dynamics of Information Diffusion (four page PDF), in which they test some models of viral marketing in an email experiment with over 30,000 people. It seems that messages tend to spread much more slowly than previous models have suggested, primarily because there are huge variations in the response time of individuals in a network. We tend to regard response time as uniform (or speed of message spreading for a given person) as uniform, but it turns out that is not the case. There are insights here for people looking to bring their campaigns to the tipping point of success.
Posted: 12/2/09; 6:06:22 PM # |
| Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion |
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Lots of so-called "best practices" in social marketing are never backed up with real data. At best, we get case studies, which tend to be cream-skimmed examples selected to demonstrate the point being made by the expert who is pitching the practice. Since I'm teaching a seminar on this next week - Light a Fire: Successful Social Marketing for Nonprofits - I thought I would share some real research on the topic.
I'm no fan of the pharmaceutical industry, but they are definitely experts at relationship marketing. The industry commissioned a study of social marketing, with a particular focus on the idea of targeting "opinion leaders", from Raghuram Iyengar, Christophe Van den Bulte, and Thomas Valente of the Wharton School's Marketing Science Institute. The result is a report entitled Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion (94 page PDF). Nonprofits would do well to learn from its insights, which emphasize the role of connectivity of a stakeholder (rather than their status) as the key predictor of a message being spread. We help nonprofits map out this connectivity and almost none of the organizations we've worked with have the slightest idea of the levels and channels of connectivity of their stakeholders. Do you?
Posted: 12/2/09; 5:44:41 PM # |
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