Posts Tagged: activation

Thoughts — 2 Comments
16
Jun 08

Obama and the Internet

This morning, Pew released summary findings from their ongoing study of the Internet and the 2008 election. Alan Rosenblatt’s written them up for techPresident. In the context of Obama’s recent victory in the 2008 primary, I thought I might revisit some of my previous thinking on Obama and the internet.

There seems to be consensus that Obama is the internet’s candidate. Pew’s findings confirm this, as do countless anecdotes about Obama’s internet prowess. When thinking about technology and campaigns, we have to think about directionality. The common assumption is that technology generates awareness; i.e. campaigns should create technologies to market a candidate. This internet-centric view affirms the value of the internet as a game-changer, in which a candidate can win because of the internet.

The opposing view casts the internet as a harness; rather than generating interest online, interest is generated in many spaces, and internet technologies exist to harness the interest. Instead of looking as a technology as an end, technology becomes one of thousands of means through which interest, communication and money is funneled. I’ll argue that this model, as opposed to the game-changing model, is the model of Obama 2008 and successful future candidacies.

Candidates are brands. This was never more clear to me than the years between 2000 and 2006, where “W” and Bush/Cheney bumper stickers proliferated. Affixing that bumper sticker was a signal of class, status and ideological affiliation – that one could “afford” to support Bush, and all that Bush’s brand embodies. With all due respect to the other candidates, Obama has emerged as the brand of 2008. His message, youth and pan-cultural appeal have created a perfect storm, and now he’s bigger than Apple, Google, Nike and Vitamin Water all put together.

So lets get back to technology and directionality. In January I wrote a piece for TP called Social Networks and Youth Voter Activation. Rejecting the game-changer model, I argued that social networks act as harnesses for activated interest. If you’ve got a population that is activated by a brand, they’ll turn to the information tools at hand to further that interest – through information seeking, friend-finding, volunteering, donating, etc. Therefore, the first part of Obama’s success wasn’t the tools he developed, but rather the tools that were at hand, that we all knew how to use – Facebook, YouTube, etc.

Tools are only part of the equation – they only provide a venue for communication. In The Social Filter, we see how communicative norms have changed around the technology, to allow all of us to become “personal marketers” to one another. Yes, I hate the idea of personal marketing, but the fact is when you send a YouTube link, invite someone to a Facebook group, broadcast a Twitter of support – you’re marketing to your networks. This is very low level, contextually-appropriate marketing (and if you’re like the 95% of the homophile us, your friends share your interests), but it is marketing nonetheless. Such marketing builds a cycle of activation, one that drives interest back into toolsets, marketing to personal networks, and so on.

This is not to say that Obama hasn’t developed cool tools. I’m sure he has. But I’ve used his creaky social network, and I can guarantee you that Obama’s success online has nothing to do with the tools he’s developed, and everything to do with the tools we already use. These tools of social interaction provide spaces for communication, spaces into which we share our messages, contest our beliefs, and negotiate our candidate of choice. That Obama’s demographic is very clearly the users of these tools, that he has creative types working for him, that he isn’t fighting peer-production only makes this cycle more successful.

Obama’s is the model of successful internet campaigning. Supporters must be activated, they must use the tools they know and understand, and the campaign has to take its hands off. This formula has created a cycle of activation, one that will continue to grow through the general election and thereafter.

Thoughts — No Comments
7
Jan 08

Social networks and youth voter activation

Cross posted to techPresident.com.

Since the 2008 races began, we’ve collectively watched the social technology space for emergent technologies that connect or motivate potential voters. I’ve looked for silver-bullet tools – a great Facebook app that brings the candidate to the voter, or a new type of social network tool that gets out the vote, raises funds efficiently, etc. Largely, I’ve been disappointed; the candidates haven’t developed too many cool or innovative tools, and the neat third-party ideas haven’t gained all that much traction (with a few notable exceptions). Even last week I was telling friends and reporters that this was the YouTube election, which unfairly writes off the whole social network space.

After watching the Iowa returns and reading blog and press accounts, I’m starting to see a potential third way for social network technology. Caveat, I don’t have ethnography to back this up, this is just my opinion, but I think there’s something here. So the old model of social network sites and campaigns proposes that some uber-tool, say a great Facebook app, leverages all sorts of information and eventually gets out the vote or raises funds. That is, the end goals of the electoral process can be attacked programatically, that all problems are solvable with enough data. A nice idea, but not true. Facebook’s Beacon and Social Ads are insightful here; even with unlimited data and great programming, machines attempting to “socially” influence fall short; the algorithms and points of interaction just aren’t human enough. I don’t want to join Blockbuster just because I’m served ads with the face of some guy I’ve met a few times, and I probably won’t switch my vote just because a candidate is spamming my newsfeed.

Lets step back for a second and think about where social networks excel: Birthday reminders. When I log into Facebook, I can see whose birthday it is today, and within a few seconds go post a “happy birthday” reminder on my friend’s wall. I’m happy, my friend is happy, and the whole transaction has cost me no more than thirty seconds. What can politicians learn from social network birthday messages?

Social networks encourage interaction, and the birthday wall posting is an example. There are two important factors in this transaction: the ease with which you can see your social network (the friend list) and ease and multiple methods which you can contact that friend through the network. By multiple methods, I mean wall posts, private messages, poking, superwall, etc. Unlike email, which is single mode and carries all sorts of social context, multiple methods of contact enable one to choose an appropriate space for messaging, one that fits the context. As political messages are sometimes controversial, having multiple message spaces enables the individual to consider the best space in which to pass the message, and act accordingly. That is, humans can effectively tailor their message to the space.

So what does all this mean? Social networks provide excuses for interaction. An articulable friend list makes it easy for one to envision and contact their network. And multi-modal messaging makes it more appropriate to pass political messages; if you’re not comfortable directly soliciting new friends to come to a fundraiser via direct, personal message, you could post a casual invite on their wall. Because there are multiple contexts and expectations, the humans can suss out the best venue for their messages and act accordingly. This effectively means more messages, passed by humans, in more appropriate, less spammy contexts. This means humans influencing humans, virtual shoes hitting the pavement.

One large question remains: how does this cycle of connection get started. In the technocentric vision, there’s some great algorithm in the sky that motivates us. In the scenario I’m posing, activation comes from far more traditional means: advertising, media coverage, empathy to candidate, etc. A potential connector is reached via the media and decides its time to start working for his or her candidate. The connector turns to online information sources, subscribes to mailing lists, Googles the candidate, and starts passing messages to like-minded friends in the social network context.

The obvious downside of this approach is that it reifies existing models, it blasts the technocentric approach, and it treats social networks as a message channel, not some revolutionary new social space. That is, its somewhat reality based. Simply because a generation uses social technology it does not mean that the entire playbook has to be thrown away. Young people see ads on TV, they page through the newspaper left open in the kitchen, and they pick candidates for reasons similar to anyone else. What is different about the social network users is that once activated and motivated, they can very effectively leverage these high-availability, low-spam, popular message networks to influence friends and contacts. In fact, the throwaway, simple nature of messaging in social networks is its virtue; a 2500-word email with graphics doesn’t work, but a young person may decide to click through a wall post or private message from a friends. And of course, once a cohort of supporters are identified, it becomes trivial to be always connected and activated in an SNS.

Web 2.0 technologies have long forced candidates to step back and take their hands off, there’s only so much they can control. Social networks are just another example; supporters will use the networks for purposes they devise. The record youth turnout in Iowa wasn’t caused by social networks, but one can imagine that wall postings, reminders, events, and personal messages kept young people activated, motivated and interested. It wasn’t a huge group, a Facebook app, or some algorithm that provided motivation, but rather interpersonal contact in appropriate venues. To this extent, social networks are part of a communication ecology, albeit a very important one for a very important demographic. Candidates should consider how best to leverage this reality, as it provides both a challenge and tremendous opportunity.

Thoughts — 8 Comments
26
Nov 07

We’re not sheep, you’re just not paying attention

Following MoveOn’s new Facebook membership-drive/petition, a number of important Web 2.0 bloggers have, on cue, posted about privacy apathy. These bloggers argue that we’re sheep, that we don’t care about privacy, and that like Newsfeed, we don’t care about Beacon and our cross-site privacy. These bloggers look at Facebook’s growing numbers, see the impressive trends, and conclude we don’t care about privacy or anything else Facebook does. This logic is flawed, of course – it’s sort of like saying any American who doesn’t renounce their citizenship and move to Canada agrees with President Bush.

Facebook’s brand represents a place, that place being a virtual community made up of our friends, family and contacts. To put it more bluntly, at the macro level, we’re brand agnostic when it comes to social network sites – we go where our friends are. Over the years, we’ve reified the commodity nature of these networks, migrating every few years.

If we think of the space as a commodity, it becomes apparent that the real value of the site is in connection and communication among ties. Therefore, an optimal design strategy for the site is pure transparency, where the site simply acts as the vector for useful connections. A flawless, perfectly efficient flow of information between individuals should be the goal of any social network site.

So if we really imagine Facebook as a collection of our friends, what does the brand entity of Facebook represent? The brand entity of Facebook is governmental; the only time one interacts with Facebook as entity is when they are being controlled or punished. Facebook as brand represents surveillance and domination.

You might be wondering what the point is, so I’ll get to it. For many users, Facebook does represent a community, with friends, strangers, police and government, and an economy running on social and economic capital. While this community is far from democratic, the users and their government have worked out a balance of power, negotiating and re-negotiating this balance as Facebook and new entrants introduce change.

Of course, Facebook users have little individual agency when it comes to political action. Yes, they can join groups, or add a protest application, but short of committing Facebook suicide, what can they do? The protest action comes in the form of privacy. Over the past three years, privacy has skyrocketed inside of Facebook, with millions of users making the profiles friends-only. If you’re a Web 2.0 blogger who only uses Facebook as a rolodex, this doesn’t appear strange. But to the millions of early adopters who used Facebook as a nexus for social information, this seriously devalues the network.

Think of it this way. A few years ago, Facebook was a city where no one felt the need to put locks on their front doors. Nowadays, we’ve got strangers, a police force that will kill us if we don’t use our “real names”, and surveillance bots that track us across the web and report what we do to our friends. Of course we’re going to deadbolt the house.

But here’s where things get tricky. As we’ve discussed, a social network should be transparent, connecting friends and sharing useful information. Friends should be the main feature, not the network (Facebook) itself. As people shutter themselves and share less information, Facebook is using Beacons, Applications, etc to create a pseudo-information market, hoping that I won’t notice this information is useless.

When I joined Facebook, I cared that I could find my friend’s address and see his or her pictures. However, I don’t care when my friend buys something or superpokes someone else. Since I’m getting less of that good information, Facebook is trying to stave off the what’s next problem by flooding me with “constructed” information. In making Facebook’s useless-information-production apparatus central, the real value of the network decreases.

The Web 2.0 bloggers look at Facebook’s adoption numbers and conclude that we’re not responding to the service’s continued intrusions. We’re just sheep, they say. But when you stand back a bit, things get a little bit more clear. Among mature users, privacy is skyrocketing as users shut themselves off to the world around them. And as millions of individuals join Facebook, and the useless-information-production apparatus of Beacon and Applications flood us, the site becomes less about one’s friends, and more about Facebook itself.

As Facebook becomes more about Facebook and less about our friends, we should consider what prompted these changes. We should also consider where these changes will take us. If Facebook becomes less about our friends and more about the brands we support, can we rationally make an argument that the site will stay relevant? Of course not. We’re not sheep. In fact, the users who have reacted to Facebook’s transgressions are shaping the site in powerful ways. Next time you log into Facebook, ask yourself just how much of the information spam you encounter is actually useful. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

Thoughts — 1 Comment
29
Aug 07

Facebook Platform Engagement and Political SNS

As we know, Facebook Platform is dealing with some serious spam/abuse problems. This is compromising the Facebook experience – even Facebook’s generally rock-solid technical infrastructure is paying the price (yesterday FB logged me in and out about 30 times, in addition to being offline). To address a part of this issue, FB is changing its ranking algorithm for its application directory to reward engagement. This is a good step, and I hope they also follow this logic down to the newsfeed; I don’t care about every application my friends try out, but rather what applications they enjoy and actually use.

This somewhat tangentially relates to an interesting post from Greg Bloom over at TechPresident. Greg challenges some of the metrics of SNS and widgetized engagement in the political sphere, and he brings up some great points – here’s a snippet.

There is an opportunity here. For months now I’ve been getting on the losing side of arguments about the utility of the Change.org and Facebook Causes app – I’d pan them because they have adopted a narrow fundraising paradigm that doesn’t seem to me to fit right, but I’d lose these arguments because I never was able to verbalize what exactly these political activism applications should encourage. I don’t think I’m going to lose that argument any more! It sucks to be reminded that you’ve raised zero dollars to stop global warming—and may I say that it must somehow suck even more to be reminded that you’ve raised a cool ten dollars to stop global warming—but if I could show my friends how many politicians I’ve told to do something about global warming… well, I just might shoot my mouth off at politicians all day.

So much of what’s exciting about this aspect of social networking is still in the realm of the hypothetical. The robustness of these interactions will depend upon some pretty fine technical points (like, when I post on a Senator’s wall, how widely will that message be distributed through my friends’ feeds? What if the message gets deleted from the politician’s page – is there a way so that my network still sees that I posted it in the first place?) Presumably, staffers will keep their bosses’ profile pages sparkly clean; presumably, once they realize how disruptive these walls could be, many politicians would take them down entirely (although many others would learn to embrace it). On the other hand, future “political action” apps will surely augment the process and make the Facebook interactions between constituents and their elected representatives even more dynamic.

I hope to respond to Greg’s post on TechPresident – you can read the full post here.

Research / Thoughts — 13 Comments
20
Jul 07

Where are Facebook’s Early Adopters Going?

As many of you are likely aware, the past month or so has been all-Facebook, all the time. It’s an exciting time for Facebook, though the whole “Facebook is the next…” genre or blog post is wearing a little thin. This post was inspired by an article Wired released a few days ago, entitled “As Facebook Grows, Longtime Users Draw Privacy Veil.” The gist of the article is that as more users flood the site, the long-time users are shuttering themselves from the world.

Research I’ve run confirms this; in fact, even baseline privacy statistics are telling. In January, I found that on average, 25% of users make their profiles completely private to strangers in-network; the superset that uses any privacy settings is likely much higher. Compared to 2005 and 2006, where I found privacy rates at 6 and 10%, that’s a very significant jump in just a year. Of course, the “opening” of Facebook is not the only factor at play in the privacy equation. Media reports and “stranger danger” all influence the decision, as well as many other factors.

I think the Wired article is particularly interesting, however, because it sheds some light on how the early adopters are reacting to this change. Let’s face it, “Open Facebook” and Facebook Applications have substantively changed how Facebook feels to the early adopter. These students now have to deal with unwanted friend requests from family members, high school classmates, distant relatives, strangers. Facebook is no longer a protected, bounded community, and this disrupted sense of community is important. In earlier iterations of “openness”, the response was significantly small enough that the sense of community was not disturbed globally (though undergrads who were spammed by high-schoolers may disagree). However, with the extreme interest and ramping adoption of the service as of late, there is a noticeable disruption in the community.

At the same time, Facebook applications are flooding the information space with Spam. Granted, Facebook understands this and is working to fix it (applications now have a Spamminess score), but this state change is also very important. A big factor in Facebook’s growth among college-students was its ability to provide relevant information very efficiently. Students could log in, see what their friends are doing, get information, and go on with their lives. Now, the information space is extremely cluttered. Whereas my newsfeed used to be full of updates about people I cared about, now it feels like an ad stream for applications as people try them out. Let me make a sneaker analogy: I don’t care about every pair you try on and put back when you’re shopping for sneakers, I care about the ones you actually buy. Perhaps Facebook could learn from this, and only notify me when someone has used an application for a while?

Of course, that’s just one issue with applications. While I like them (I’ve even created a few), I don’t see why applications have to come at the cost of information economy. To the early adopters, these changes are very significant. It’s a simple equation: More people into Facebook = less people I actually care about. At the same time, the clutter created in the information space by Applications are further diluting the power of the information “fix” Facebook provides, and I believe this is a very serious issue.

As we look at the early adopters, and see how they are shuttering themselves to the outside world, one wonders what this means about the network as a whole. Networks are living things, and the early adopters make up Facebook’s core network. If these people are shuttering themselves from the storm of adoption and application spam, the network certainly still grows at the fringe, but it is dying in the middle. Granted, networks are resilient, but centrality is above-all, and the center of Facebook’s network is reacting.

The longer I spend studying networks, the less I see them as “revolutions” or even all that different from everything else in life. Friendster, Myspace and Facebook all have had their moment in the sun, but like anything else, the audience is fickle. The early adopters who have shuttered themselves from the storm, the college students who are getting spammed and made uncomfortable by an uncle’s friend request – they will go other places. And it may not be today or in three or six months, but change will occur. Tastemakers are inherently nomads, and I can sense that the innovators (to use Roger’s term) are already out exploring the fringes of what’s next. Perhaps there’s something inherent about “places” – we can only share them so much. And now that Facebook is a place for everyone, and people are acting on this openness, “what’s next” becomes the question.

And so what is next for the innovators, the tastemaking nomads? Well, I’ve got a few ideas, and I’ve seen a few interesting next steps. Open Facebook has forced migration, and the innovators are out exploring a number of potential alternatives, some that don’t resemble “social networking.” But today, I’m not going to blow their cover, so I suppose you’ll just have to keep tuned. ;)

Research / Thoughts — 11 Comments
10
Jul 07

Adopting Communication Practice

Over on the O’Reilly Radar Blog, I came across a piece by Peter Brantley entitled “Working in Facebook.” In it, Brantley discusses a topic I often think about – how we adopt and carry forward technical skills. He argues that the skills students are learning in social networking tools will remain with them as “normal” communications practice as they move forward in their career. He says:

First, this is a fundamentally important shift generationally in what we expect from our software productivity tools. The grad students and young faculty using Facebook have used MySpace, and been Facebook members through their whole adolescent and adult school experiences. They are taking this experience with them into their work. The work of the people that I see most often is in research and teaching. But the lesson is broader: this generation will be working collaboratively in tools like Facebook. In schools, in corporations, in small non-profits, in community centers – people will collaborate and work together in social applications. And that is going to be as natural to them as email and text messaging.

Second, regardless of the ultimate fate of Facebook, the set of characteristics that it has established – the sense of community; user control over the boundedness of openness; support for fine grained privacy controls; the ability to form ad-hoc groups with flexible administration; integration and linkage to external data resources and application spaces through a liberal and open API definition; socially promiscuous communication – these will be carried with us into future environments as expectations for online communities. Facebook is an empty wasteland for people who have not climbed over the hump of use. For those who have active community within it, it is this generation’s Lotus 1-2-3.

While I agree with Brantley’s premise, I take issue with a few points. First, Facebook has only been around since late 2004, and really only became broadly accessible in 2005 – certainly not enough time for grad students and young faculty to be users “through their whole adolescent and adult school experiences.” Furthermore, I find there is little academic collaboration inside of Facebook at the graduate level. Facebook acts as a social nexus to find and connect with fellow students, but I’d dispute that many of us are actively and meaningfully working in Facebook. Sure, we can create groups, but the Facebook groups tools are poor at best, and ill-equipped to serve academic needs.

However, the key is that Facebook is a point of centrality on a campus. From this point, well-designed tools could truly serve the student base – there’s a lot of opportunity to develop such tools with the Facebook API. This is certainly an area where monetizing the API is quite possible – the amount of money schools spend on substandard learning- and course-management tools is so immense that even a fraction of the market is extremely valuable.

Back to Brantley’s point, though, I too agree that the skills students develop using social networking tools will persist throughout their lives – both social and professional. The social communication tools we use when we’re developing relationships (say, during college) become the tools of a lifetime. The practice of communicating and forming identity in social networks are normal, and we will continue to use these skills going forward. For those not “socialized” in these tools, the adoption process will be challenging (though not unlike non-email users picking up email). However, this sort of communication – using social networks and associated techniques – is past the point of becoming normal. For a large swath, it is normal, and teachers and designers should work on incorporating these methodologies going forward – the are inevitable.