I was trying to figure out if social media can help social causes and took
some notes on the subject. Please comment and let me know about your
opinions :
Social Media
Milton Mukhopadhyaya
Social media consist of all the different ways in which users of the web can
share or publish media/information/knowledge on the web. It will help to
check traditional media once more to understand how social media has brought
a revolution. Traditional media that we daily consume are newspapers,
television and movies. All of them are characterized by following properties
: they are easily scalable to millions of media consumers, they support one
way flow of information and they all need significant resources for
publication. Now things are quite different with social media :
> It democratizes tools of production. Individuals cant buy a press or a TV
station, hence traditional media will always be in the hands of
corporations. On the other hand every internet user can write a blog for
free, upload his photographs to flickr (www.flickr.com) or upload his vides
to youtube (www.*youtube*.com)
> It demoratizes distribution. A lot of businesses use this opprotunity to
aggregate mass produced media for media consumers. These businesses earn
their revenues from advertisement but media producers get the distribution
channel for no cost.
> Social media is about conversations, it is not unidirectional flow of
information. A blog post is not complete without its comments. You post a
tweet and somebody replies back to you. The essence is in participation. You
read a wiki article and you probably edit one sentence to fix a 'comma', but
that is something.
> A lof of platforms gives its users the capability to create groups.
Members of such groups can publicly or privately exchange information.
How social media is influencing our behaviour :
*Niche :*
Chris Anderson in his book "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is
Selling Less of More" discussed a lot of those above properties how they
help niche interests. So though none of my friends or acquintances are
interested in a particular niche subject ( for example Umbanda :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbanda), I could be a member of a web based
group where people from different parts of the world come together and
cluster around such topics. And it is not only about individuals with 'odd'
interest clustering together it is also about creating affinity groups
around odd interests of normal individuals. Jacko could be interested in
both cricket and orangutans(http://www.orangutan.org/) but now he has school
friends with who he plays cricket and web friends with who he discusses
orangutans.
I am not sure if it is provable but I am quite convinced that democracy is
relatively better than many other systems not because of the fact that we
can democratically elect our governments but because it creates an ecosystem
consisting of many different institutions organized around different value
systems that interact and restain each other ( for example government and
supreme court). But even here there are only a few such organizations and
they are controlled by a very small group of people. The ability to create
ad-hoc groups in the Internet may change this. Once we have millions of such
small groups, the collective effect of their voices may change the
sociopolitical landscape of our world forever.
*Sources of News:*
Just some years back I would get to know about important news from newspaper
headlines or TV news. Now I mostlly get them from twitter(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter) or links that are forwarded to me by
my friends. A few weeks back mashable.com reported : "The latest study from
Pew Internet analyzes the news Americans are consuming and various different
ways they find news. Based on a sample of 2,259 adults, the study reveals
that three fourths of the people (75%) who find news online get it either
forwarded through e-mail or posts on social networking sites, and half of
them (52%) forward the news through those means."
*Innovation:*
It is easier to innovate around these technologies firstly because, it is
much simpler and cheaper to create even more interesting applications that
are accessible by other people as a lot of free and opensource tools and
services are available. Secondly creativity happen when people can freely
build on each other's creative outputs and ideas, in software this
particular way of developing is called 'mashing up' (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid) )
Can social media help us in preventing natural disasters ?
- Many of frequent natural disasters like large scale floods happen because
of human actions. For example some of the reasons of flooding of river banks
are i) deforestation ii) ill-planned artificial dams iii) climate change. As
more and more people are getting into the Internet, social media can help us
in influencing the social conscience about nature and people. This would
probably be the most important reason to use social media tools. After all,
natural disasters are symptoms of a more deep rooted problem related to our
relationship with nature. It might be possible to create and stimulate more
conversations around these themes. As we get more aware more sympathetic
more in tune with nature our opinions and therefore our actions would change
accordingly. By the way web based content publication is getting equally or
more popular in developing countries. According to
www.readwriteweb.comUniversal McCann reported that in China 70% of
internet users write a blog,
in Phillipines 66% of users write a blog, while it is 60% in Mexico. Also
top markets of social networking are Phillipines (83% of internet users),
Hungary (76%) and Poland (76%).
- Social media can help us reach big corporations and governments through
collective actions. Suddenly netizens have more power than ever before. It
is possible to create conversations about big corporations and brands with
relative freedom. A corporation as big as Royal Dutch Shell (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Dutch_Shell) could not stop John Donovan
from having his website (http://royaldutchshellplc.com/) which is dedicated
to expose Shell, it keeps posting reports against Shell every day costing
Shell billions of dollars. There are many other such instances. For more
information check :
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/migrationtemp/2815430/Online-revol....
On the other hand slowly but surely big corporations are also recognizing
the power of the web. Corporations are increasingly participating in
conversations around social media as part of their marketing campaign, and
agreeing to demands of the people more and more.
- Social media can also help relief efforts and collecting funds. It is
possible to create paypal account and get donations directly from web users.
The concept of crowdfunding is not yet big but may have a lot of potential.
Some examples of non-profit efforts :
Project NOAH(http://www.networkedorganisms.com/about). It helps people to
discover local plants and animals and document them. The have an iphone app,
which can be used to upload a photograph of some plant or animal along with
location information. In the networkedorganisms website you will be able to
browse through world map and know about plants and animals of different
places.
Causes (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2318966938) : It is
a facebook application. It lets individuals participate in raising awareness
about any social 'cause'. For an example see how Global Fund for Women uses
the tool :
http://exchange.causes.com/2010/03/how-the-global-fund-for-women-uses....
SaveDarfur (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2204696276) : It is a
group on facebook intent on helping people of Darfur region of Sudan.
Twollers (http://twollars.com/) : It is a kind of virtual currency in
Twitter. According to the text on their site : " Twollars is a currency of
appreciation for Twitter. Twollars are designed to reward positive actions.
" Twollers can be given to individuals or charities. Businesses can later
purchase these twollers from charities for real money. To quote them : " As
a business you can ‘purchase’ these Twollars from the charity with ‘real’
dollars (or any other currency). So for example, if Vitamin Angels has
received 10,000 Twollars in donations from Twitter users, you (as an
individual or a business supporting Vitamin Angels) can purchase these
Twollars for USD 1,000. The charity directly benefits from the donation. And
you benefit from owning a large number of Twollars. Remember, they represent
the stored positive, social energy of your potential customers."
What can we do ?
*Blog :*
Blogging is powerful but it takes time and patience. There are hundreds of
thousands of blogs in the web, it is not easy to stand out to make your
voice heard. Some of the things that we can do to make blogs stand out are :
i) Make it vertical, let it be about a single category like ecology or rural
development etc..
ii) Let every individual of a non-profit organization have a blog. It takes
5 minutes or less to start a blog. It is real simple to start a blog on
Posterous (http://posterous.com/) or Tumblr(http://www.tumblr.com/). If you
have 50 persons in your organizations. If each of them write an essay on
ecological problems in West Bengal every day, then we will 18250 essays on
the subject on the web within 1 year.
iii) Write small essays but write frequently.
iv) Use photos. A lot of photographs are freely availabe on flickr or we can
use our mobile phones to take ameteur photographs.
As an example check this blog on 'Bihar Flood Relief' :
http://biharfloodrelief2008.blogspot.com/.
*Groups :*
We can can create groups in Orkut, facebook, Linkedin or Ning for our
causes, and invite people to join there. SaveDarfur shown above is such a
group in Facebook. Ning gives a nice platform to create groups. Check this
group : ...
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