technology in translation™

social media and real time election coverage: today's the day to see how the internet is changing the flow of political information

If you're wondering about the value social media can add to your work and personal life, today's election is a really good opportunity to look at some use cases.  

ReadWriteWeb has published an Election Day Web Toolkit with a comprehensive list of the resources available for voter information, real time results tracking and aggregated coverage of the election.  I've  put two of the most interesting applications in this post, below.  You can stay on this page and refresh it throughout the day to keep up date with election results and conversation.

I encourage you to spend some time looking at what's available, use what you need to help you vote today and keep track of the election results - and then think about how you might employ some of these same tools to solve a communication problem in your work life or provide resources for your community.

For polling information, I've been following fivethirtyeight.com, which has a cautionary post today on Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls.

Some highlights from ReadWriteWeb's list:

Twitter Vote Report pulls together "tweets" (text messages or micro blog posts) about what's happening at the polls, including how long people are waiting in line in individual locations and maps them for easy access. (For information about Twitter, check out this video.)  [Update - the mapping site was working this morning but I can't get the page up at the moment, which may be a traffic issue.  NPR has the map on its site here, and if you still have problems here's the text-only vote report.]

Electicker is a one-page aggregator of all kinds of election news.

Report voting problems with video:

• Bring a video camera with you to the polls to capture your voting experience on YouTube's Video Your Vote channel. Google is using Google Maps to track these videos across the country - and to see where polling problems might be occurring during the day.
• Document the irregularities or other problems you encounter with your cell phone camera, Flip videocam, or other device, and then upload that content to the CBS News social-media site CBS Eye Mobile. Alternatively, you can submit by e-mail to the address politics@cbseyemobile.com. The CBS News Investigates team will monitor those submissions, and may then present select ones in election coverage at CBSNews.com or in on-air reports.

Google Maps is posting real time results on a map, and you can zoom in on state and county results for the presidential and congressional races.  Choose a state (or the entire country) and a race from the pull down menu in the left corner, then put your cursor over the map for current results in the county or state you select.

Socialmedian, in partnership with the Washingon Post, is pulling in all election comments and media from sources like Youtube, Twitter, blogs and Flickr photos.  You can get a widget like the one below and put it on your blog, your web site or in a feed reader like Netvibes.  Or if you refresh this post throughout the day you'll be able to follow it from Technology in Translation.

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[UPDATE] Just ran across an interesting widget from Intrade, which predicts the electoral vote distribution using its stock market formula.  Okay - it's an odd use of financial language in this context, but it's somehow appropriate to the current economic climate.  It's also interesting to think of the electoral college through a market-based analogy (however unintended!).

why social media marketing matters

One of the best things about the evolving web is that you can create good content, put it online and then re-use it on multiple sites.  And you can find other people's content on blogs and media services like YouTube and Flickr and share it on your site.  Slide Share is a place to discover good business information, and it's a particularly rich source for social media thinking.

Marta Kagan has put together a great presentation about what social media is and why you need to make it part of your marketing strategy - whether you're a small business, large corporation, activist group, non-profit or sole practitioner.  She pulls together useful marketing statistics with social media basics. 

What The F**K is Social Media?

view presentation (tags: socialmediamarketing marketing web2.0 socialmedia)

new Pew reports challenge assumptions that internet usage limits face-to-face contact

A recent report by the by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that teenagers (a.k.a. digital natives) use telephone and face-to-face contact for their primary social interactions.  A second report finds that 18-30 year olds are more likely to use public libraries than any other age group. 

While neither report was specifically designed to explore how online engagement affects offline engagement, both indicate that young people use the internet to supplement, rather than replace, social contact and participation in civic activities.

Results from a survey about how people use online information searches to solve problems

challenge the assumption that libraries are losing relevance in the internet age.

Libraries drew visits by more than half of Americans (53%) in the past year for all kinds of purposes, not just the problems mentioned in this survey. And it was the young adults in tech-loving Generation Y (age 18-30) who led the pack. Compared to their elders, Gen Y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information and in general patronage for any purpose.

Furthermore, it is young adults who are the most likely to say they will use libraries in the future when they encounter problems: 40% of Gen Y said they would do that, compared with 20% of those above age 30 who say they would go to a library.

Pew's study on Teens and Social Media finds that

Despite the influx of digital media into their lives, teens continue to rely on telephones to keep in touch with their friends.

While text-based digital communication technologies are increasingly prevalent, the telephone continues to reign as the instrument of choice when teenagers want to interact with their friends. However, those who have cell phones and those who are avid internet users have different communications profiles from the entire teen population.

Face-to-face contact still matters.

All of these technology-based communication methods still do not replace face-to-face communication for many teenagers.17 In the general teen population, 31% of the teens in this survey reported that they spent time with friends in person doing social activities outside of school every day, 34% of teens reported that they did so several times a week, and 24% of teens reported that they spent time in-person with friends after school at least once a week. Older teens – the very people who are more often using other forms of  communication like cell phones or instant messaging – are more likely to report spending time with friends in person doing social activities outside of school every day or several times a week than younger teens. 

Across the spectrum, the communication activity that changes the least is the frequency of face-to-face encounters; 31% of all teens have this kind of interaction with friends every day outside of school; 34% of cell phone owners do so; 35% of multi- channel teens have such encounters; and 38% of social network site users have in-person meetings with friends every day.

As dana boyd comments:

What Pew's data shows is that online participation correlates with offline participation. They are not able to show causality (and they do not try to claim that they can), but such a correlation still contradicts the ever-present myth that online activities cause a decline in offline activities. Of course, don't misread this correlation in the opposite direction either. In other words, you cannot say that if you get a group of teens involved online, they will also get involved offline.

Her highlights are worth checking out if you don't have time to read the entire report.

social media: online and in person (notes from the tcg workshop)

Here are the notes from the presentation I did with Brad Carlin, of SITI Company, at the TCG conference on Saturday.

In addition to posting my presentation slides here, I've set up tcg_workshop_links tag on my del.icio.us account with relevant links.

You read the notes that accompany the slides by reading the extended post, or download them by clicking here.

 

social media ground rules

Catching up on my social media reading, I ran across Dion Hinchliffe's post, Social Media Goes Mainstream.  While I don't think it's mainstream yet (soon though!),  Hinchliffe proposes five ground rules that flesh out the "what" of social media and are essential to facilitating conversation and community engagement.   

Defining Social Media: Some Ground Rules

1. Communication in the form of conversation, not monologue.  This implies that social media must facilitate two-way discussion, discourse, and debate with little or no moderation or censorship.  In other words, the increasingly ubiquitous comments section of your local blog or media sharing site is NOT optional and must be open to everyone.


2. Participants in social media are people, not organizations.  Third-person voice is discouraged and the source of ideas and participation is clearly identified and associated with the individuals that contributed them.  Anonymity is also discouraged but permissible in some very limited situations.


3. Honesty and transparency are core values.  Spin and attempting to control, manipulate, or even spam the conversation are thoroughly discouraged.  Social media is an often painfully candid forum and traditional organizations -- which aren't part of the conversation other than through their people -- will often have a hard time adjusting to this.


4. It's all about pull, not push.  Like John Hagel and John Seely Brown observed in the McKinsey Quarterly a year ago or so, push-based systems, of which one-way marketing and advertising and command-and-control management are typical examples are nowhere near as efficient as pull systems.  Pull systems let people bring to them the content and relationships that they want, instead of having it forced upon them by an external entity.  Far from being a management theory, much of what we see in Web 2.0 shows the power of pull-based systems with extremely large audiences.  As you shape a social media community, understanding how to make embrace pull instead of push is one of the core techniques.  In social media, people are in control of their conversations, not the pushers.


5. Distribution instead of centralization.  One often overlooked aspect of social media is the fact that the interlocutors are so many and varied.  Gone are the biases that inevitably creep into information when only a few organizations control the creation and distribution of information.  Social media is highly distributed and made up of tens of millions of voices making it far more textured, rich, and heterogeneous than old media could ever be (or want to be).  Encouraging conversations on the vast edges of our networks, rather than in the middle, is what this point is all about.

The full article is well worth reading on Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog.

social media: concepts & contexts for activists

I spent Saturday at the Detention Watch Network conference, where I was on a panel about social media with Mallika Dutt of Breakthrough, moderated by Doua Thor of Southeast Asia Action Center.

You can download the presentation slides as a pdf which includes my notes and some of the web sites we discussed.  I've compiled a list of examples and resources on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us - using the tag detentionwatchtech.

Reflecting on our conversation, I return to questions about content and the personality of the organization, rather than looking at the social technologies as a panacea.  Don't jump on the trend wagon until your goals are clear.  It's likely that starting a blog, joining social networks or sharing videos can support your advocacy and education work, and you can implement them in small steps.  But they could also draw resources from effective ways of engaging your constituents off line - so take the time to consider this.  Before you change or add new communications tools, use the planning process as an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of your current and past work.

In addition to thinking about social media in terms of advocacy and publicity, consider how it can enable more efficient information sharing and collaboration within the Detention Watch Network.  And how it might be used to develop a living repository of and for the collective wisdom of the field or a particular organization.

Get young people involved.  Working with new technologies is a great opportunity for shared learning.  Organizations and activists can learn from students for whom social media is second nature.  And students can learn about activist processes, history and media literacy from people who've been working in the human rights field for many years.

Finally, if you have specific needs that can't be met with existing tools, there are many people developing new tools and mash-ups, working with an open source ethic, who might be interested in customizing something to solve a particular problem - which could then be made available to other organizations.

a definition of social media

Social media describes a new set of internet tools that enable shared community experiences, both online and in person.

A community, in this context, is a group of people with common interests who connect with one another to learn, play, work, organize and socialize.  Communities can be large or small, local or global.  They can be public or restricted to members.

Social media allows people with basic computer skills to tell their stories using publishing tools such as blogs, video logs, photo sharing, podcasting (audio stories broadcast from the web or downloaded to a computer) and wikis (collaboratively edited web pages).  They can also help us filter and organize the overwhelming amount of information on the web.

Social media tools make it easier to create and distribute content and discuss the things we care about.

Some better-known social media examples are Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube (I've embedded YouTube videos in blog posts), and Flickr (where the photos on the blockwork web site come from). Other communities develop for support (Cancer Survivors Network), networking (LinkedIn) or political action (John Edwards).

There are also social bookmarking sites – such as del.icio.us – which is where the words below come from.  These are tags (key words) that categorize my bookmarks, which I’m able to share with you below. They are, in a sense, the story of my web wanderings.