Daily Archives: July 20, 2009

07.20.09
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Outcomes and examples

For my Carnegie UK Trust report on the use of social media in civil society, we want to include a list of “outcomes”, i.e. possible results of using social media (provided that you do it right, of course!). We’d also like to pull together some very short examples – from charities, NGOs, unions, mutuals, co-ops, etc. – that illustrate these outcomes, where we can. Of course, there aren’t necessarily enough examples out there, but it’d be good to try and find some.

Here’s our preliminary list of outcomes:

  1. Social media helps to engage with segments of the population that traditional marketing may find it difficult to reach.
  2. Social media enables conversations to take place, which facilitates the co-creation of knowledge.
  3. Social media improves the relationship between an association and individual supporters, as well as between supporters.
  4. Social media allows information to rapidly ripple through a community, thus enabling quick and effective mobilisation online and offline.
  5. Social media provides platforms for dissent by allowing people to express discontent or highlight abuses of power.
  6. Social media strengthens offline communities, and offline events strengthen online relationships.
  7. Social media improves the transparency, governance and accountability of organisations, which increases trust in those organisations.
  8. Social media brings about financial benefits by helping organise direct and indirect fundraising.
  9. Social media, used internally, helps improve the effectiveness and efficiency of organisations and enables flexible staffing and volunteering.
  10. Social media helps create highly responsive and less hierarchically governed civil society associations.

Do you have any more key outcomes that you think we’re missing? Any of these that you disagree with? And, most importantly, do you have any examples that would illustrate these?

07.20.09
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links for 2009-07-20

  • A Crowd-Sourced National Communications Census – O'Reilly Radar
    Kevin: The Federal Communications Commission in the US has been charged to draft a National Broadband Plan, something akin to the Digital Britain plan in the UK. "The FCC collects broadband deployment statistics from industry. But, the statistics are gross. If one site in a zip code has broadband, the whole area is considered high-speed." There are gaps and serious deficiences with the industry reporting of broadband deployment. We've heard this before. For these reasons, they are thinking of trying to crowdsource the data. Watch this project for interesting ideas on how to crowdsource information.
    (tags: US internet broadband crowdsourcing policy)
  • Drupal for Newspapers « Content Here
    Kevin: I'm a big fan of open-source, and as this post says, many small and medium newspapers have had great success with Drupal. The Newspapers on Drupal group is assembling a list of modules commonly used by newspapers
    (tags: newspaper drupal cms)
  • Can Social Games Make More Money?
    Kevin: Brian Reynolds says: "A common problem with current social games, Reynolds said, is that they don’t make players’ choices interesting over time, instead “burying the player in tedious repetitive clicking.” The challenge is improving the games’ progression curve, so players get steadily increasing rewards (points, virtual money and items) to encourage continued play. He believes simply refining this would instantly make social games more fun to play."
    (tags: socialmedia games design)
  • Personal Branding Becomes a Necessity in Digital Age
    Kevin: An excellent post looking at how journalists have worked to build their own personal brands alongside the work that they do at publications. It's an important thing that will help journalists break out of their institutions and develop career opportunities broader than the papers or broadcasters that they work for.
    (tags: blogging branding careers)
  • How 'fortress journalism' is crumbling
    Kevin: BBC World Service Director Peter Horrocks writes about how 'Fortress Journalism' is crumbling and how journalists main job is not longer to fight journalists in other fortresses.
    (tags: journalism change future)
  • A push-start for three innovative media ideas – Random Mumblings
    Kevin: Jack Lail writes … "the McCormick Foundation funded three proposals from new media women entrepreneurs at $10,000 each so they can launch within a year."
    (tags: newmedia funding women startups US)
  • Reflections of a Newsosaur: Why there won’t be another Cronkite
    Kevin: Alan Mutter writes about the passing of Walter Cronkite. He was the anchor that I remember (barely) from my childhood, but even those very early memories were of someone trustworthy and honest. Alan believes that we will never see another anchor like him in this age of multi-channel television. There are some great comments on this post, well worth reading if you are familiar with Cronkite's work.

    I'm not certain that we won't see someone like him again, but it will be much more difficult to see someone who has that position in the US journalistic landscape. It was a much simpler world back then in terms of that people had fiewer choices. There were three major broadcast networks. No cable. No internet. People had fewer choices. It's a good post. It will get you thinking.

    (tags: US television journalism trust)
  • How User Behavior Influences Search Results
    Kevin: Kim Krause Berg writes on Search Engline Land: "Success in search engines was never quantity of pages vs. quality. It still is not. Rather, search engine market success is keenly tied to understanding user behavior and this is becoming more and more obvious every day."

    And I'd have to say that understanding user behaviour is what we need when it comes to building news sites and building new journalism businesses. We need to understand how users behave and also what they want. It's not about pandering to users' needs as much as finding out what their informational needs are and how journalism might go about meeting those needs.

    (tags: search userexperience research marketresearch)
  • IRE’s Role in a National Data Catalog
    Kevin: Derek Willis (who works at the New York Times) writes: "The folks at Sunlight today announced an effort to build a catalog for national and state datasets, going beyond what Data.gov is doing at the federal level."

    There is a great opportunity here for journalists, academics, civically minded programmers and government transparency advocates in the UK to join forces on a project like this. It's about sifting through the masses of data to find the sources that are most relevant. It's not about replicating the data as much as it is about sifting through it and highlighting it. It's a fascinating idea, and I hope that we can work not only in the US and UK but elsewhere.

    (tags: government data journalism transparency egovernment)