quackquack

Finally, some real Facebook organizing:

Some 18,000 students accepted the invitation posted last month on Facebook, the social media site better known for publicizing parties and sporting events. And on Tuesday many of them — and many others — walked out of class in one of the largest grass-roots demonstrations to hit New Jersey in years.

The mass walkouts were inspired by Michelle Ryan Lauto, an 18-year-old aspiring actress and a college freshman… until now, Ms. Lauto said, she has used Facebook only to keep in touch with friends and let them know when she is performing in shows. She alerted those 600 Facebook friends to her message calling for a student walkout and asked them to pass it on.

@avinashkaushik on the virtue of failing fast, video from @kanter:

Avinash Kaushik on Failing Fast.

Avinash feels that in a world of finite resources, it is very important to experiment and fail fast.   With social media and on the web, experiments are fast, cheap, and scalable.  The learning that results is what brings your more success.   Experimentation also helps an organization make decisions based on audience feedback and analytics data, not your own hunches.  This try it, fix it approach leads to incremental improvements which in turn leads to better outcomes.

Martin commentary: One of the things I love about the web is that the kinds of decisions that get made by hunch or bluster can actually be checked by data. You can learn so much about your site use from checking comparative bounce rates and doing A/B tests, both of which are regular topics on Kausik’s blog.

Clay Shirkey on the changing role of non-profits in an era of social media. From Socialreporter. Via @robinmsf.

Annual sessions starts this weekend! Links to the multiple group blogs, hashtags and other social media goodies.

From Philcooke.com:

The Wall Street Journal reports today on some massive new media buys for advertising causes from the Christian left. As it reports, “The religious left has a long tradition of activism on social issues, including the civil-rights movement.” Left-leaning Christian groups also have started to attract funding from secular donors who share their political goals — and who see Biblical appeals as a promising way to broaden public support.

Martin’s commentary:

Money trumps mission statements. If salaries and status is being paid for by secular donors then sooner or sooner-still the organization will do what it takes to keep them happy. I know plenty of pseduo-spiritual political organizations, both liberal and conservative, that randomly toss out Bible quote to “religiousfy” what’s really just a secular political message.

I’m not against lefty big media or religious media but it’s important to remember they’re rarely the same. Jesus wasn’t a Democrat or Republican and he never made a big media buy.

Via @emergentvillage

Why would a social media network have a page on another social media network? Good question, but hundreds of people have signed up for the QuakerQuaker Fan Page on Facebook. And why not? It’s just as good a place to share some of our favorite Quaker media as anywhere else.

As of midnight, the fan page has an easy to remember URL. Check it out at: http://www.facebook.com/quakerquaker

If you’re a Facebook user, please consider becoming a “Fan” of the page!

The folks at Friends General Conference have a Twitter feed and designated tag for the year’s FGC Gathering of Liberal Quakers in the U.S. Being flexible, QuakerQuaker.org’s FGC Gathering coverage will be pulling from both the new official “#fgc09” tag and the “quaker.fgc” tag that many of us have been using.

For the curious, here’s a link to the 2006 post when I first suggested that Friends start tagging our FGC Gathering social media.

“The biggest revelation is that the State Department asked Twitter not to go down at its original time last night in order to allow Iranians to tweet out what’s happening in their cities. It also seems that U.S. officials are watching the chatter on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook (Facebook), and elsewhere to keep up-to-speed with the situation on the ground. Social media communication is even more important, since the U.S. has no embassy or official relationship with Iran.”

Quote from David Armano’s piece:

“In the past few months I’ve noticed a trend. Organizations of all shapes and sizes are appointing people into “social media” positions. From VP’s of Social Media, to Social Media editors, etc. It’s indicative of the fact that businesses are taking the space very seriously and making investments to grow capabilities. But if you dig a little, you’ll often times find that some (not all) of the people placed in these positions have very small “footprints” in the space. A recently created Twitter profile with a very short history, a presence on Facebook that looks like an unfurnished apartment, no blog to speak of. You get the point. And it’s got me thinking. Should the people who lead the charge within your organization be active participants in the medium? Does it really matter?”

I left my own comment at on his site. I found this via Dirk at Herd.

Adam Ostrow looks at the successful Facebook campaign by the makers of Vitamin Water.

Although there are a few risks of building a campaign that directs users to a social media site versus your own property, the benefits are likely to far outweigh them if you can successfully get people engaged. Not to mention – what’s the last memorable corporate website you visited? Vitamin Water’s site – though impressive graphically and informative if you’re looking for details about their sports drinks – has absolutely no compelling reason to come back to it.

On the other hand, users will keep logging into Facebook for the foreseeable future, and in turn, seeing updates from the brand on their homepage. Vitamin Water’s approach makes sense, and turns what would otherwise be a difficult-to-measure branded advertisement into an interactive one with tangible results.

—-

See also: my recent O’Reilly Media piece, Will Facebook (all but) Replace Corporate Websites?

From Zakazukhazoo via Dirkthecow:

“Social media is just another bunch of communication channels which work the same way as talkback radio and letters to the editor do. The only difference is that everyone gets to be Rupert Murdoch and the old people aren’t invited. It’s not rocket science, it’s just the way people communicate now. If you’re interested in it and you’re adept at expressing other people’s opinions in 140 characters or less, you’re looking through a small window of opportunity here to pimp yourself out as a social media consultant. You’ve got about 8 months left to hold seminars and help newbies guide the way, but by 2010 all the road maps will have been re-written and marketing managers, PR firms and advertising agencies will be bypassing your little bridge in the woods as they travel down the newsest section of the information superhighway, on which Twitter will have been relegated to the slow lane and Facebook will be a distant speck in the rearview mirror.”

Martin’s comment: Cynical and depressing, but true of how the PR people have been gumming up Twitter lately. It needs to be about communication and real engagement.

From NYTimes: “Alongside the explosive growth of online video over the last six years, time spent on social networks surpassed that for e-mail for the first time in February, signaling a paradigm shift in consumer engagement with the Internet.”

See also: my recent articles: “Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites” and “Nonprofits and Social Media.”

“Many people on twitter want to add social media consulting or claims of social media expertise to their little bag of tricks. This is quite prevalent now. Indeed there seems to be a wave of people seeing social media consultancy as something they can just breeze into and use to make money from naive clients. This ruse is assisted by the fact that it is difficult to prove social media expertise, but rather easy to claim it. One obvious way to lay claim to twitter expertise is to amass a large number of friends and followers. Another is to seek high rankings in the various twitter ranking systems or on twitter leaderboards.”

Below: the Twitter account of @avenueofthearts this past Friday, all noise no signal:

“Living Beyond Breast Cancer has won supporters for one of its biggest fund-raisers with e-mail blasts, brochures, and personal calls to big donors. But that’s so yesterday. For the first time, the nonprofit based in Haverford is posting to its new Facebook page information on this year’s Yoga Unites event, which takes place Sunday. It also is tweeting on Twitter as @YU4LBBC and uploading video to YouTube. Of course, Living Beyond also blogs, and it shares photos on Flickr, including one of women saluting the sun on the steps of the Art Museum, where the annual Yoga Unites takes place. As a result, the number of teams signed up for the event has nearly tripled, the group reports. That’s the bottom-line promise of ‘social giving,’ which uses online networks to raise awareness and, ultimately, money.”

Martin’s Commentary:

For context, my recent posts on Nonprofits and Social Media

Will Facebook (all but) Replace Corporate Websites
I’m looking at the work of a potential non-profit client now. They have a fine website: recently redesigned, it has intuitive navigation, good e-commerce and a design that projects elegance. The client is staffed with some fantastically-creative people and the web team is obviously skilled. Yet despite all this, the website itself feels oddly static.

Nonprofits and Social Media
Over the last few years we’ve focused on email lists. We all have big email lists—tens of thousands of users, segmented all sorts of different ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seeming not spam. A new era is coming with social media. 

Batch vs Real Time Processing and the Emerging Web Culture
Malcolm Gladwell treats us to another of his counter-intuitive x-rays of the world’s workings in this week’s New Yorker feature, “How David Beats Goliath.” His focus on the difference between batch and real time processing is a key to understanding why many nonprofit and commercial marketing professionals can use Twitter, Facebook and other real time media.

The reason for all this? Surprise, surprise, the democratisation of the Web and the rise of social media. According to the authors, brands by and large haven’t shifted gear still keeping hold of 20th…