Mobilizing Youth

ROI and HSUS

Here's a great post by Beth Kanter about ROI, detailing the experiences of the Humane Society. I profiled the Sunny the Seal MySpace experience in my book - and this post fills out more about how the HSUS is circling around developing ROI metrics. So glad to have some followup. Thanks Beth. 

Genocide Intervention Network: One of the best social media case studies

This is a great example of a successful social media campaign. Be sure to read about it:

http://rootwork.org/blog/2008/10/using-social-networks-social-change-facebook-myspace-more

Using Social Networks for Social Change: Facebook, MySpace and More

View more presentations from Ivan Boothe. (tags: sns networks)

FaceForce: Facebook Meets Salesforce.com

Wow, this is an interesting move. Very smart. Combine Facebook's enormous tangle of users with Salesforce's app development platform and you have a great recipe for a gazillion business apps that solve some key painpoints - namely, integration into the daily routine of people and a familiar UI. This should get interesting.

http://www.thefaceforce.com/

Facebook app usage flat

Some interesting stats just out about flat Facebook app usage. My longterm hypothesis is that app usage will decline considerably due to the walled garden effect, unless Facebook does something fairly radical to their platform design.

"The number of published apps continues to grow steadily (to over 32K) but total usage remains flat. Besides the fact that the top 10% of apps account for 98% of total usage, aspiring Facebook app developers should know that only about 6% of apps average at least 500 active users per day"

From O'Rielly blog.

Facebook & MySpace have same traffic

Just came across this news tidbit - FB and MySpace have an equal number of unique visitors (115m). although MS continues to lead FB in the U.S. (72m vs. 36m).

http://b-side.com.sg/blog/2008/06/facebook_no_longer_the_second.html

Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?

Reading Notes.

What:boyd, danah. 2007. “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?” Knowledge Tree 13, May. http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/?page_id=28

When: May 2007

Link: http://www.danah.org/papers/KnowledgeTree.pdf

Reading Notes:
* the terms public and private are no longer binaries
* youth embracing, albeit awkwardly, the shifting social architecture
* adults panicking
* usage pattern of SNSes is driven by offline social circles
* challenging to intrepret context in a mediated space. there is no guiding physical space
* internet lacks walls
* advice for educators:
    - Recognise that youth want to hang out with their friends in youth space.
    - The Internet mirrors and magnifies all aspects of social life.
"What would it mean to have digital street outreach
where people started reaching out to troubled teens,"
    - Questions abound. There are no truths, only conversations.

Facebook Causes Giving Challenge

The setup: Attract the most new donors through FB Causes and win $50K for your organization. 2nd and 3rd place: $25K, 4-13th place, $10K.
http://apps.facebook.com/causes/giving

Winners:
1) Love without borders foundation: 4564 donors
2) Tibetan freedom movement: 4522
3) fight poverty with Nourish International: 1816

This contest was brilliantly conceived. I got at least 10 requests from activists from across the board. From my buddy Nathan at Tibetan Freedom Movement (congrats on 2nd place!) to smaller orgs local to san francisco who were experimenting with facebook for the first time.

With the award money, the Tibetan movement raised over $125K in sum.

Why was it brilliant? A lot of it has to do with realizing the benefits of Causes on FB. Over the past year, there have been some limited successes, but most of the smaller groups were having trouble making any headway. The contest gave then a cause d'etre. The real winner here is Casuses & FB. They've brought 1000s of new donors into the mix - made them aware of the platform and proved that social fundraising can work. Of course, the 2nd contest of this type won't have the same juice. They've got to find a new angle - equally as exciting to galvanize the ground troops like this.

Social Networking Research

Some good research on social networking:

Link:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/social-networks

This is the first in a three-part series on academic research that illuminates social networks, one of the most important trends in design today.

Facebook send to all friends app: idea

I was just thinking that a very useful FB app for nonprofits and political campaigns would be a "send to all friends" app. Just a simple app that would work around the 10/day limit by taking your message and sending to 10/day automatically - so that you could write a message once and just let it go. If you've got a lot of friends, it'd take forever, but better than not being able to send a message out to all friends now. Or, the app could distribute the load over people who have signed up to the app but have not used their daily quota, so as to aggregate message sending quota. Perhaps you could specify which organizations/people would be allowed to use your quota. Might make FB more useful to nonprofits as an advocacy tool.

added: 5/16/08:
this post is one of the most popular on the blog. i'm not sure why. please post a comment and tell me why you've hit upon this post. what were you looking for? what are your FB friends needs? Are you looking for an app that sends to all of your FB friends?

Social Networking for (young)Adults

Over the last several days I've been working on my chapter about social networking. In the chapter intro, I'm trying to put together a discussion about the structural reasons for the rise of social networks. Naturally, I've been going through danah boyd's treasure trove of papers dedicated to the topic. She makes many compelling arguments that revolve around the idea that young peoples' (meaning: teens) public spaces are increasingly structured and mediated by adults. This fact means that teens have few spaces (or time) in which to hang out+explore/define identity without the watchful eye of an adult - or at least the influence of an adult. She pegs this trend largely to middle-class suburban teens and makes the point that poor teens don't have access to public spaces in the first place. [ref. p20] She summarizes this argument (and some others that she makes in the paper) by saying that "collectively, four critical forces – society, market, law, and architecture – have constructed an age-segregated teen culture that is deeply consumerist but lacks meaningful agency"[p.21]

Thus, social networks fill this void. They offer non-adult regulated spaces in which teens can explore identity, socialize, and engage publicly. And teens can do it from within adult-regulated places (eg: home, school). She wraps up by stressing the importance of 'publics' to society. A pithy quote: "Publics play a crucial role in the development of individuals for, as Nancy Fraser explains, “they are arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities.” By interacting with unfamiliar others, teenagers are socialized into society. Without publics, there is no coherent society. Publics are where norms are set and reinforced, where common ground is formed. Learning society’s rules requires trial and error, validation and admonishment; it is knowledge that teenagers learn through action, not theory."[p21].

OK, I buy it. But I have questions. And I think there might be more at work here. This theory works for teenagers. But it doesn't do much to explain the popularity of SNs among older people. What about the 29 year old who logs onto Facebook 3x daily? She owns a home and manages a team of 5 people at work. I'm sure there's some identity definition going on, but it's not the driving force behind her usage. She regulates her own space. She is an adult. She didn't grow up with social networks, but she loves Facebook. And what if she lives in San Francisco or New York and has access to coffee shops, art openings, wine tastings, and a vibrant street life? She's not turning to Facebook to fill a connectedness void. She's not the poor soul alone in a sub-division out in suburban Sacramento looking down the street at the haunting blue flicker of her neighbors' television sets. She's more or less defined her identity (do we ever finish?), found her place in adult society and lives in a city with vital and accessible public spaces. And she still loves Facebook. Why? What are the structural reasons for her ongoing usage? They're not the same as for the teenager - and yet, some may also apply to the teenager (just as a subset of the teens' reasons apply to the 30something). And she's in good company. A recent study found that over 60% of MySpace users are 25+; 6% of adult web usage takes place on SNs. Adults spend more time on SNs than reading news sites. [ref]

As is often the case, after I take a good many hours thinking through an issue, I find that boyd has already authored a paper/blog post on the same topic, so I look forward to finding that probable piece, but in case it doesn't exist, I'm positing some hypotheses. And still looking for other authors who have written on the topic. It seems that analysis of adult social usage (vs. business usage) of SNs is not as hot a topic as youth usage.

10 Minute Friending Fix
Young adult lives are structured every bit as much as teen lives. Usually it's the young adult that has structured their life, presumably by free will. But it's busy - too busy. Wake up, feed dog, read paper, drive to work, work, lunch at desk, commute home, gym, and maybe a couple hours for something interesting. There's never enough time to see even the best of friends - even those who live in the same area. In-person friending is a matter of constant triage. There's some guilt associated with triaging friends, but mainly a desire to have more time to spend with good friends and at least some time to spend with acquaintances (should they, perhaps, become good friends). SNs allow adults to get in snippets of friendship. The call with boss is done, spreadsheet finalized, and in 10 minutes you can get in some good QT friend time. And you don't have to triage. You can spend 10 minutes updating your profile, status, and photos - and through this low-effort act, passively stay in touch with all of your friends.

Low Commitment, High Efficiency Friending
In a minimum of minutes, you can reach out to individual friends and perform the crucial act of friend maintenance. You didn't need to drive down to the bar, find parking, get 2 drinks, and come back home - just to meet up with a friend or two. SNing is efficient friending. As an additional boon, you don't have to feel bad about cutting out after 10 minutes. Short time frames are an expected dimension to SN-based friending (ps. I realize I'm bending the usage of the term 'friending', which has come to mean the act of becoming someone's friend on a SN). You can cut out of chatting or of updating your profile with little or no excuse. You just can't put in that kind of minimal time at a bar. When you go to the bar or to a friend's house for dinner, you're committed.

It's Not Boring
Online, there's always something to do. If your chat with a friend starts to drag, there are photos to tag, videos to browse, Amazon to shop, games to play, new friends to make. Even the best of friends are boring sometimes. They talk about their remodel or their kid's poop and for 5 minutes you want to be somewhere else. Online, you can be. You can engage in a conversation either asynchronously or while multitasking. Real life is stimulating and can engage all of your senses to the highest degree,..but it usually doesn't. Hanging out online guarantees that your mind will be engaged.

It's Highly Controllable
Unless you're Winston Churchill, you're witticisms often fall flat. Your friends understand - that's why they're your friends. But wouldn't it be great to say the right thing all the time? To have that zinger at the ready? And what about fashion? To be the debonair casual dresser always in style. Or the hipster with appropriately ironic t-shirt? Whatever the verbal or sartorial style, identity on SN can be carefully considered, cross referenced, and researched. While teens may be exploring their identity, young adults are finding just the right refinement. Online, time and resources are available to become an identity perfectionist. For the young adult, the SN identity complements offline success.

Maintaining Distant Relationships - Sewing Career Seeds
Teens typically use SNs to build relationships with their proximate peers. Young adults, on the other hand, often have friend networks that span states and countries.Anecdotally, the long-time long-distance relationships usually fade in time. In a previous post I quoted Ganz who said that in-person meetings are the single most important element that galvanizes activism. The same holds true in ongoing friendships. But SNs extend fade-time by providing a degree of proximity. You hear that your old college friend Jan is getting married through her Facebook status update. You never would have thought to ask Jan, nor would she have contacted you. Yet, you're now connected as if you were actually better friends than you are. Or perhaps, you have now become better friends as a result. I think there's a twofold incentive here for young adults. 1) Maintaining distant relationships feels good. You feel more connected. 2) Friends can be useful. Most careers thrive on real-life social networks. Next year when you're looking for a new job, Jan may know someone who knows someone and you can call in the favor without feeling guilty for staying in touch only when you want something. After all, you are in touch - you know important things about Jan. You've seen her Hawaiian wedding and vacation photos. You may have sent her a "congrats" online greeting card. With a minimum of work, your SN has helped you to sew the seeds for future career success.

So those are a few types of value that a SN adds to young adult/adult life (I recognize that I'm talking mainly about post-college career life and that these values don't apply to every young adult). What are the structural reasons? If diminishing public spaces is the groundwork for the popularity of SNs among teens, what's happening with young adults? A few ideas:

Global Mobile Lives
Decades ago (and in many other countries) young adults live near their families. By and large, my generation and those subsequent does not. We move. We travel to college across the country and settle hundreds of miles away. Our jobs sometimes take us across the globe. When we're lucky we take time off to explore foreign destinations. We live disconnected from the communities that raised us and we miss them. We miss home. We're nostalgic for the sports teams, the foods, and even the highschoolers of our teenage years. We meet new people on our travels. We like them. We want to be their friend. But they live afar and we don't have the time or money to visit all of these people. Our social networks were scattered, weakening, and haphazard. The SN makes these loose ties stronger - we didn't expect that they would ever be stronger. But with high efficiency friending, we can reach back out to the acquaintances who may have been otherwise lost. We can reconnect with family and friends of old. We'd never give up our global mobile lives - and suddenly we haven't lost so much in deciding to live this way.

Overscheduling
Just as some teens are overscheduled by their parents, we overschedule ourselves. We laugh at the French for their efforts to maintain the 35hour work week. If only we could work 35 hours, we'd have a four day weekend every week. We laugh out of unrequited envy. And yet, we'd never give up trying to fit it all in. My 30yr old sister wakes up at 5:30am to leadbootcamp in Dolores park, takes the train to Berkeley for her PhD classes, goes to an afternoon job, babysits in the early evening (b/c it's the best money around for a starving student), and then either falls dead asleep or heads to the bar to meet friends. It's a busy life. SNs fulfill our socialization desires while fitting into our self-imposedoverschedule.

The Green Movement & Our Precious Moments
Saccharine Hallmark phrase aside, since time is so precious, every moment must count. If one moment drags, better to multi-task than let it waste. We can do this. We were raised on music videos. SNs make our social interactions more efficient. They free us from all-consuming face to face interactions (I say "free us" with a light intonation of ironic cynicism). We love this efficiency. We love thePrius. Leo bought it. It's green. We love green. We hate waste.

SuperSize Friending
The American obsession with size was canonised by Morgan Spurlock's movie Supersize Me. The same concept applies to our social lives. SNs give us more friending. Despite seeing Spurlock turn pallid as he supersizes, even as we value the Prius for consuming less fuel, we still believe that more is better. With SNs, we're able not only to friend more efficiently, but to friend more widely. While we're not into friend accumulation in the same way that teens aggregate unknowns on MySpace, we do value a wider network of somewhatknowns. Supersizing our friending improves our career horizon while fulfilling our desire to maximize our experiences and consumption.

These ideas off the top of my head. Must do more research in this area. If you're reading and have been thinking about this topic, I'd love to hear what you think - or to be directed to further writings. There's a whole other argument to be made for the sequestered suburban young adult. This person's reasons may be similar to those of the teen. At the same time, teens may experience some of the lifestyle effects listed above as well as some of the same benefits from SNs.

References
boyd, danah. (in press) “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked
Publics in Teenage Social Life.” MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning, Identity Volume (ed.
David Buckingham).

9/9/07: added: a nod to older people in this article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227872/site/newsweek/page/0/, but doesn't say a whole lot.