The (In?)finite Possibilities of Organizing through New Media (Reading Response #6)

The readings for today were totally inspiring.  I really appreciated the M+R and online campaigning articles because they presented takeaways that will help nonprofits and other organizations with new media departments to replicate the results of the Obama campaign and understand how people are reacting to and using online nonprofit campaigns right now.  Before reading these articles—even though I had heard about the potential of online fundraising before—I think I still largely underestimated the power of small-dollar donors.  (And it appears that the amount of money that nonprofits are making online is increasing: the amount of money raised online increased by 26% between 2007 and 2008 according to the eNonprofit Benchmarks study.)

Moreover, this week’s readings demonstrated the types of videos that nonprofits and the Obama campaign have used to engage their supporters.  I wrote in my blog about groundswell about the fact that watching online videos is the most popular type of online engagement.  While very different, the types of video that Endthelies.org and the Obama campaign used both created innovative ways for the target audience feel closer to the work that the organizations were doing—by displaying the type of hate that HRC works to combat in the former and by giving Obama supporters in-depth explanations of the statistics and facts that the campaign was working with in the latter.  Both models are helpful. The EndtheLies campaign gives organizations that perhaps cannot afford to produce their own videos a way to use video effectively, while the Plouffe and Obama videos demonstrate how to set up a video to make an online audience feel like they’re in the room.

One media  frontier that showed up in the readings but was still a bit unclear this week: text messaging.  I recently broke down and bought a $30/month unlimited data and texting plan from AT&T after going over on my bill by almost that amount for about half a year anyway….  I remember hating it when my friends texted me before I got the plan… especially one-word texts like “ok.”  Texting for some is free, but for others, it is really expensive. Until recently, it was 10 cents a text for me.  For that reason, I would never have signed up for a nonprofit’s text-message campaign.  Even without one, I remember being annoyed on election day by all the texts I got saying “Go out to vote!” when I already had.

That being said, it is true that if someone texts me to do something, I will be more likely to do it.  What the Benchmark study says about the higher click-through rate for people who were texted makes a lot of sense.  Still, I think that the Online Tactics report is right that this type of outreach is still evolving, and we’ll need to give it time.

One place where text messaging is more effective than email or online organizing is in sub-Saharan Africa.  My friend, who worked in Tanzania this summer, says that one day, he went to a workshop at a high school in Dar Es Salam.  When his colleague asked the class who used the internet, he said that only a handful, about 5% raised their hands.  When he asked how many of them had mobile phones, everyone raised their hands.  Both the State Department and nonprofits are beginning to use text messaging more and more to reach out to civil society in other parts of the world (see my Class Paper Topic for more information).  For this reason, I think that the greatest value for mobile text messaging right now is to connect online campaigns in the U.S. to a broader, international audience.  That being said, it does not seem that many organizations that could be taking advantage of text messaging in this way are doing so… which I think is a mistake.

the groundswell in all it’s glory: the good, the bad, and the ugly (Reading Response #5)

The White House is doing a really good job of taking advantage of the groundswell.  Unfortunately, other parts of the federal government aren’t.  I think it’s crucial that other federal departments catch up to the White House’s lead, and quickly, if the President’s push to make government more transparent through the internet is really going to work.

One of the most interesting facts that I came across in the groundswell reading was that watching videos is the most common type of participation in groundswell activities.  29% of online adults watch video content from other users while 28% read online forums or discussion groups and 25% visit social networking sites (p. 42).  So people are still looking for some face-to-face interaction through the net… and video seems to be the best way to reach them.

As I’ve made clear in my previous posts (such as my post on government blogs and my post on creating a Facebook page the U.S. Mission to the African Union), I’m most concerned with how the State Department can enhance its use of online media to reach out to both Americans and foreign publics.  The Department of State is good at putting out frequent videos of Secretary Clinton or Daily Press Briefing by Spokesman Kelly.  However, the White House is definitely trumping State in terms of the ways that they are using a combination of different social media outlets to really involve stakeholders in discussions about policy online.

This summer, the White House started doing citizen interviews, in essence, where a member of the President’s advisory team would answer questions on video as they were coming in through a chatroom.  Here’s one with Van Jones. Great idea!  Given that people like to watch video, but they also seem to have an interest in discussions—videos can sometimes be one-sided—this method combines those two goals flawlessly.

The online video interview also does something brilliantly sneaky—it allows the White House site to screen negative comments or undesirable questions without anyone even knowing they came up.  But in Chapter 4 of groundswell, Li and Bernoff warn that things will go wrong, i.e. people will talk negatively about you or your product, when you turn to online media.  The White House also has a Facebook page, which allows for anyone to post comments or pictures.  Many people use this forum to be critical in a way that is just plain rude.  When critics go too far, I don’t think they even need an answer because it’s so clear that they are acting out for the hell of it…  And often, the mix of supporters and denouncers works itself out without interference: someone will shell out a criticism and then someone else will counter it (or vice versa with praise). (I also like the idea that Ayisha brought up in one of her blogs a few weeks ago that “[t]hose who want to be influenced by supposed narcissistic, doubtful content will always find a way and those who want enlightenment (as they define it) will find their way too” so “viva la bloggers!”  In the end, it’s really about letting everyone have their say and showing that you’re willing to air even the insanely brutal, or threatening, remarks on your website in the name of transparency.)

But what do you do on a public forum when someone sends you a reasonable critique or concern?  There is a letter to the President about multiple military deployments of a close friend on the White House Facebook page.  Now I believe that elected officials are required to respond to all constituents—I know a few people who have written letters to the White House and all have gotten pretty prompt responses.  Charlene Li was recently quoted in a news article saying that when you open yourself up to online media, you have to respond, promptly, to peoples’ comments.  So does the President’s responsibility to respond to constituents extend to Facebook and other online sites?  And should he do it publicly, or privately? If he does so publicly, then he’s really writing to everyone who can see the Facebook page and will have to write a very stump-speech-like answer.  Moreover, since writing Facebook comments is much easier than sending a letter, he opens himself up to a flood of comments to reply to.  If he does so privately, then we don’t see his answer and we never know if he responded or not (potentially making him still look unresponsive to the general public).

So there are still some things that I think the White House is working out regarding its online activity, along with the rest of us… I am interested in seeing how they work it out, because it will lead other federal departments in dealing with the same issues.

Reading Response #4

The readings this week convinced me, if I wasn’t already convinced, that both the innovation of bazaar-style open source development and the more interactive nature of Web 2.0 have been valuable and important to the development of the web experience for both users and developers.  Indeed, I felt that Eric Raymond taught me a few life lessons in his piece (‘Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow,’ and ‘Perfection (in design) is achieved…when there is nothing more to take away’ to name a couple.)  Moreover, the O’Reilly piece got me excited about where Web 3.0 is headed.  If programs are already being developed for multiple devices, then when will I be able to connect my text messaging capacity to my friend’s TV so that I can wake her up in the morning by zapping a video that I’ve just captured  of Ben Affleck, buying a coffee at Starbucks?  (His article also made me feel a little bit guilty for never sending the error reports when programs fail on my computer—I feel like I’m being a bad user!)

However, there was one question that struck me about the value of user input in software/service development.  To provide background for the question, here a few reminders of some similar questions and comments  raised in the past:

• Antoine wrote a few weeks ago about the blogosphere being “powerfully fair but fundamentally unequal.” His main point was that the distribution of attention to different blogs is unbalanced.  Some bloggers will end up lost in the ever-expanding and nebulous World Wide Web, in essence having conversations with themselves, while others are pulled into the limelight through links to and from internet stars.
• I tried to make a similar point in my first reading response, where I asked the question, “What if the experts just aren’t well- linked online?  Is Page Rank really giving authority where it is due?”

My argument today is related to these previous blog posts, in that it deals with the politics of who gets to create information, and who gets listened to, on the web.  Open source development allows the online community to engage in the process of creating a software product.  In one section of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Raymond talks about the Delphi effect, according to which “the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers” (13).  He goes on to say that because “contributors for any given project are self-selected” and have spent a long time learning about the software in the Linux model, they are “highly likely to have something useful to contribute.”

I believe I have a counterexample.  I am a Facebook junkie, meaning that I am always on the site, even when I’m on vacation or working abroad.  Recently, Facebook has been asking users in other countries to help translate Facebook to different languages.  I love learning, and practicing, different languages, and as a result, I’ve studied Zulu for about four years now.  I have been tempted at times to say, “Sure, Facebook, I’ll help you translate this page into isiZulu” though to this point, I have not. In any case, learning Zulu and trying to use the internet in the process has taught me one thing: online resources are unreliable!  With a language like Zulu, the person giving the translation is, more often than not, not a native speaker.  Then, sometimes, there will be a native speaker who gives a translation to English that totally changes the meanings of whole phrases so that they’ll be more poetic or less political.

Here’s an screenshot that illustrates my point:

(I googled “zobona amagwala,” a phrase in the lyrics of a song from the Lion King, and this website came up first on my search.)

An example of an online Zulu translation gone wrong...

I’ve written in corrections in orange.  Look at all the spelling mistakes! Many of the words aren’t joined together where they should be, and many of the translations are disputable/wrong.  There are a lot of people out there who think that they speak Zulu, many actually in South Africa, many who actually ARE South African, but speak another of the country’s 11 official languages as their native tongue.  (Facebook is asking ME to translate, for heaven’s sake! And goodness knows I shouldn’t be…but there is no one to stop me!)  Moreover, I hardly ever see Zulu translations on the web coming from native Zulu speakers…most likely because of the vast socioeconomic disparities that still haunt South Africa as a legacy of the apartheid era.

My point is that in some cases, the users may NOT be the experts.  And the Delphi effect can’t work if the majority of the people speaking up are confused. (Raymond notes that the consensus of the ignorant is often correct in his article… but with Zulu, I find that most people just agree upon the meaning of some phrases, even if the way that they agree upon doesn’t best express the significance of the words used, and propagate it into truth.) In this case, it might be better to hire someone for this part of the development process, mightn’t it?

 

 

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Reading Response #3

Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans article hit home for me, but it resonated in a different context than that of the starving-artist-gone-digital.  I have learned that even in a context outside of the profit-driven marketing campaign, developing True Fans is quite important.  This past summer, as a State Department intern, I created a Facebook page for the U.S. Mission to the African Union (USAU).  Now, the reason that federal agencies like State are interested in social media is to increase online engagement with the people that they aim to affect, but I quickly came to see that this was not as easy as I thought it would be.  The Facebook page’s “fans” grew steadily over the summer, but I found that the type of engagement that we were getting was limited.  People would join the page, and might even post an occasional “like” after one of our status updates, but we weren’t generating online discussion or even articulate reactions to the things we were posting.  We needed true fans.   Kelly says that, “A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce… They have a Google Alert set for your name… They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up… They can’t wait till you issue your next work.” And if you remove the profit-model references from his definition, that’s what I mean by true fans, too.  Fans who would visit the page daily just to see what was new. Fans who would post their own anecdotes—(using “stories that ‘have a point’” as Rosenberg so eloquently puts it, p. 349 of Say Everything)—in reaction to the articles and declarations we were releasing.  Fans who would passionately debate the issues that we raised in our online forum.  And like Kelly, I had a goal: 100 True Fans by the end of the summer would make our Facebook page a success. (Clarification: The long tail model can be applied to generating an online discussion in the same way it can be applied to generating revenue…you can have a few “super true fans” who comment a whole lot or a lot of fans who comment periodically…so I thought that 100 fans who commented passionately whenever they found something interesting would  create a very robust discussion.)

But we were stumped—or in reality, I should say I was stumped—on how to produce such types of online interaction.  (I suppose that’s one of the reasons that I took this class.)  And though the context for Kelly’s article is different, my question for him is still vital and relevant:  HOW DO YOU GET TRUE FANS?!?!  Because, while 100 (and even 1000) is a reasonable, imaginable number…it can be a rather intimidating goal, as well, if you’re unclear on how to best use the internet as a tool to sell your product or spread your ideas.

I still don’t have a full answer to that problem.  However, in retrospect, I have realized that some of the lack of interaction was due to the fact that our “fans” weren’t quite sure what their role should be.  When an embassy, led by an Ambassador, goes digital on Facebook, does this FB page drag along with it the decorum and formality of its diplomatic roots?  Or can you be less formal with an online diplomatic entity, using a vocabulary colored with lmao’s, wtf’s, and lol’s?

I wrote last week that the problem with government blogs is that they cannot be written from a personal point of view. Nevertheless, upon further reflection, I think that the personality that a government website creates is crucial to the response it will garner.  The USAU Facebook page is still new, but as fans get used to the character of the page’s posts, they will begin to respond accordingly.

I wonder though, if sites like the USAU FB page will ever be able to incorporate “citizen journalism.” Amanda Michel, Michael Andersen, and Patricia Gray lay out 3 different ways that citizen journalism can work, and here’s my knee-jerk reaction to how each of them would apply to a government Facebook page:

• Michel’s article is about the OffTheBus project (now housed at a  Ning site, similar to Facebook in its social networking capacity), which brought together citizen journalists to provide interesting, bottom-up news relevant to the 2008 election.  I think that their technique would be really interesting, if successful: imagine fans in Africa and America writing Facebook notes to tag to the USAU FB page about how their experiences linked to the work of the USAU.  However, the idea of citizens reporting for a governmental institution still seems a bit off to me…like it wouldn’t be such a good idea.  The message should probably come from the people inside the Mission.
• Andersen’s article on how the Guardian mobilized thousands of citizens to help generate content rapidly could probably lend the most guidance to a site like the USAU FB page.  Sending out a list of articles about recent projects or developments at the African Union and having fans say which ones the USAU FB page should hold an online video discussion on or cover more closely would both engage fans more and show the USAU FB administrator what type of info fans were interested in hearing.
• Gray’s article about Sharesleuth might apply if there were a group of fact-checkers who started another FB page or a blog to hold the USAU accountable.  If this were to happen, I think it would serve both to debate their issues openly. However, to this point it hasn’t happened…

In any case, this week’s readings kept me thinking about how I can apply the concepts from this class to my future work at State.  Slowly, the wheels in my head are beginning to turn…

Reading Response #2

“Say Everything” does a very good job of outlining the benefits of blogging, such as the ability to create your own unedited content, the freedom of full disclosure, and the beauty of a diverse blogosphere where you can find almost any point of view.  In Chapter 3, Rosenberg even gives us a dose of Battelle’s medicine with a lesson on linking.  As we learned in The Search, Rosenberg confirms that links confer authority—and he demonstrates it clearly with the story about Jorn Barger.  Linking, and keeping track of the number of links that a certain webpage or blogger is getting at a certain time, reflects real-time authority.  Is a page currently authoritative, has it gained notoriety, or has it lost it?  Chapter 3 of Rosenberg’s book reinforced the lessons that we’ve had in the first 3 weeks about links.

But I must also say that I’m not sure about one of Rosenberg’s arguments later on in the book.     In Chapter 8, Rosenberg echoes the advice of “veteran bloggers,” saying, “to blog…is to present the truth of your life or the world as you see it” (236).  After reading this chapter, I’ve been having a hard time trying to decide how I feel about the identity issues behind blogging… How do you know who the person behind the blog really is, or how they really feel about things?  And more importantly, how real should they be?

I think that these questions are complicated with the new trend of government blogs.  And let’s face it: the U.S. government is in to blogging these days.  The White House has a blog, the State Department (my future employer) has DipNote, its official blog, and several other federal agencies are blogging, as well.  It’s very plausible that, one day, I’ll find myself on the other end of one of these Gov 2.0 blogs.  So here’s my question: how much can a civil servant really reveal about him/herself?  What if they don’t agree with a policy or don’t like a certain official?  In their government blog, which they must sign with their name, they can’t say that.  So how can they really keep it real?  In fact, there are many things that government employees have to censor themselves on because they are representing the Administration that they work for.  It seems to me that this is going to limit how genuine and how interesting government blogs can get… at least if you judge the value of blogs with the criteria that Rosenberg presents.

Meanwhile, political bloggers like the guys and gals that Rosenberg writes about in Chapter 5 can bite back at the government with real teeth.  They can defame politicians, use foul language, and be a lot less formal than government bloggers can be.  So it seems like government blogs are doomed from the get-go.  Maybe the pro-government bloggers who write independently can make it a little bit of a more even fight where both sides are represented, but it still seems like the government is really handicapped in the cold, harsh blogosphere that exists today.  For the federal bloggers that aim only to present the facts–what the Administration has done, when, and how–perhaps this issue will not pose much of a problem.  But for the bloggers who have tried to get personal (though their position clearly prohibits them), I fear it’ll only become a bigger and bigger problem.

My bad…

So I think I need to eat my words a little bit.  Maybe a lot.  I realized after class yesterday that PageRank is not actually a popularity contest at all (because the number of people who visit the page is NOT what goes into the ranking, but rather the number of links to and from the page).  It is much more similar to a system of academic citing, just like Battelle says.  Go figure. I should have named this blog “Battelle Knows…”, because clearly, I don’t.

In any case, I think I can still salvage my question.  What if your site has some very authoritative and important information on it, and it is used, supported by a lot of prominent experts but they are all old and not very tech savvy, so they have no websites with which to link to you?  I guess the answer is that you do not become the online authority, even if you’re a real authority. Moreover, I suppose this scenario is increasingly unlikely in today’s blogosphere, where more and more people are connecting on the Net.  I get it.  PageRank really is fantastic.  My bad.

Reading Response #1

I’ve got to say, while I was reading “The Search” for class today, I really felt for the webmaster of the Ulysses Grant website (I think I found it!) that wrote to Google in the late 90s to assure Page and Brin that his site deserved a better page ranking.  PageRank is clearly a brilliant innovation. But what about those sites that really ARE really good and just don’t get that much traffic?  What about the sites that are about very specific topics (that most people simply aren’t interested in) and aren’t linked to from any major sites?  Using PageRank, they may be exactly what you’re looking for, and show up at the bottom of the page.

I suppose the way to find this type of site is to be very specific with your search terms.  The problem is, most of us are lazy.  As Battelle says, “nearly 50 percent of all searches use two or three words, and 20 percent use just one” (27).  So, in essence, starting a website is like enrolling in high school all over again.  Nobody cares about you if you aren’t a part of the popular crowd, if you don’t have some connection to the “in” crew.  Even if you might be really interesting, fun, or exciting to one or two people, those people will have to go searching in the recesses of the cafeteria, expending a lot of extra time and effort, just to find you.

Now, I find it rather ironic that the creators of Google, definitely two of the biggest geeks of our times, decided that they were going to perpetuate the popularity contest that high school was in their product.  (Don’t worry, this is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black.  I’m a geek.  A Stanford-graduate-geek, in fact.  I’m just saying!)  Then again, I’ve been trying to think of some other ways that a search engine could operate.

Maybe we could talk about other mechanisms that other search engines use in class. For instance, would it be possible to create a search engine that worked on the basis of recommendations from experts or academics in the field?  I know that this is the point of PageRank, to act as a virtual citation counter, but what if I get someone who isn’t famous but is very knowlegdgeable to say my site is good?  Could there be a search engine that was fueled on the basis of what experts say?  I suppose that this would be pretty complicated in practice… you’d have to figure out who qualified as an “expert,” and you’d have to make sure that they were constantly evaluating all of the sites on the growing internet… And since PageRank has made Google a LOT of money and was one of the features that catapaulted the company to success, I suppose I can’t say that this particular idea would have a shot in hell of supplanting it…