Occupy, the Movie

Here's the first episode of Fault Lines, a documentary from Al-Jazeera about the rise of the Occupy movement and its evolution. "In just two months, Occupy Wall Street had transformed the popular discourse in Amercia, challenging people not only to demand change but to live it," the opening narration says.

To see the movie, here's Episode One. What do you think?

(Screenshot from Episode One of Faultines)

Invisible Networks

As the KONY2012 campaign continues to storm social networks and dominate the conversation in the cause sector, social data experts have begun analyzing the carefully crafted social media strategy behind it. Since March 5th, the video by San Diego nonprofit Invisible Children (@Invisible) about African warlord Joseph Kony, has been shared and viewed by more than 100 million people worldwide, the most quickly and broadly shared video in Internet history.

How did they do it? Essentially, it was a triple whammy -- extremely engaging video, distributed by highly influential social networks, mostly via Twitter. Here are some very early findings (some obvious by now, some not) by Gilad Lotan, VP of Research and Development for Social Flow, and media scientist Henry Jenkins:

* The KONY2012 campaign is a verifiable youth movement. The video was heavily viewed from mobile phones and has been most popular with 13- to 17-year-old females and 18- to 24-year-old males. The video did not "go viral" so much as its early surge of circulation depended on the hundreds of thousands of young people who already felt connected to Invisible Children, through their participation in IC and its grassroots campaigns over almost a decade. These highly engaged young people were the first to view the video, receive it and pass it along through their social networks.

* Kony2012 is a transmedia storytelling campaign. According to Jenkins, the video is part of a strategy by Invisible Children to create "multiple points of contact" with its core messages and themes of youth empowerment.

* Celebrity re-tweets played a critical role in early distribution of the video. Invisible Children enlisted its pre-existing social networks to press celebrities and made it very easy, for example, to tweet @TaylorSwift or @Rihanna within just two clicks. "Once celebrities came on board," Lotan says, "the campaign was given multiple boosts." Ellen Degeneres (@The EllenShow), for example, got mentioned 36,000 times on Twitter within the first few hours of the campaign from different users asking her to respond to Konhy2012. Both Oprah and Justin Bieber chose to respond and amplify the cause, while Lady Gaga, Jay-Z and Stephen Colbert did not.

* Twitter focused huge spikes of attention on the subjects of Uganda and Joseph Kony, according to Lotan. "It was shockingly high," he says. "If we compare the usage of the #Kony2012 and #StopKony hashtags with the #SXSW hashtag (for the very highly-tweeted and re-tweeted South by Southwest interactive conference in Austin, Texas, which was happening at the same time KONY2012 was going mega-viral), we see almost 20x difference in traffic at the peaks." Lotan adds that "#StopKony had 12,000 tweets per 10 minutes at the height of the (viral) event, while #SXSW had only 900." References to Uganda or Kony on Twitter were nearly zero before the video was posted on YouTube. Just after it was, tweets referencing Kony began reaching the level of 25,000 tweets per 10-minute intervals.

* Invisible Childen's network of young supporters across the United States were activated simultaneously to help kick off the campaign. The graph, top, represents the first 5,000 users who posted to the #Kony2012 hashtag. Each node represents a Twitter user and the edges of the graph tracks their connections, or who follows whom. "The more red a node, the earlier it had participated in using the hashtag," Lotan says. Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell (@JasonRussell) and other employees of IC are represented, as is Kristen Bell (@IMKristenBell), an early active member of the organization. (Russell has 58,872 Twitter followers and Bell has 573,075.)

* Tight-knit clusters of 'superfans' have been essential. Clusters of highly-connected individuals indicate that the viral video campaign was orchestrated initially by the top influencers in Invisible Children's social network of supporters. Profiles of these clusters show that most of the "influencers" involved in this campaign were not based in big cities geographically, but were instead tweeting mostly from five geographical locations -- Noblesville, Indiana; Oklahoma City; Pittsburgh; Englewood/Dayton, Ohio, and Birmingham, Alabama. Many of the young people involved in early tweeting of their support of KONY2012 identify themselves as being Christian youth who responded especially favorably to the use of the words "love" and "hope" and "freedom" in IC's early tweets promoting the video.

For more on these early findings, see Lotan's blog post at Social flow, and see this post by media scientist Henry Jenkins.

What do you think?

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Graphic, top, by Social Flow of Invisible Children's Twitter network just after the nonprofit first posted the video, Kony2012)

Cause Video Checklist

Our friend Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, has often referred to the importance of “viteracy” — a word he coined to mean “video literacy” — in the current social media climate. I and my NYU faculty colleagues Howard Greenstein and Tom Watson couldn’t agree more, which is why we’ve added a video lab to the social media strategy class we're team-teaching this term in the Master's program at NYU. (We’ve also just added Andrew as a guest speaker for that March 3 lab, along with some other thinkers and co-practioners.)

Here is Cause Global's list of "10 things to think about before you start shooting" a cause video:

1. Consider your video an “argument for” something — a donation, a better explanation, greater awareness, a solution, a bigger pool of volunteers, a cause. You can make it highly personal, from your own experience. Or you can approach it as a citizen journalist. In either case, you want to showcase a need.

2. Keep it strategic. Remember, you’re making this video to help advance one or all of your organization’s strategic goals as stipulated in your social media strategy papers. Good videos show versus “tell.” What does your organization most need to show? Does it need to clarify its “reason for being?” Promote a lesser-known initiative? Kick off a new campaign? Prove impact? Be clear about the purpose of your video before you start shooting. Just telling a story isn’t enough.

3. Remember “the ask.” Consider your video a visual “ask” aimed at getting individual viewers to act in some way. What will your video be asking them to do, and where can they go to do it? Will you need to configure an extra page on your organization’s Website that will take micro-donations? To text in $15? To tweet your video?

4. Choose a single, simple message. Make your video short, maybe 60-90 seconds, max. Once you’ve determined your video’s “argument” and strategic purpose and ask, then you’re ready to select the message. Boil it down to a sentence. What is the single message this video needs to convey? The American Jewish World Service, in its prize-winning, 2010 video last year, was making an argument for more cross-sector engagement. Its strategic purpose was to boost awareness of AJWS, both inside and outside the organization. The ask? To go to its Website to give money, time, ideas. And the message? Says Judd Apatow, the filmmaker: “They were saying, ‘We are a Jewish organization but we serve and support all people in need, and we need more donations and new members to help us to keep doing this well.’”

5. Choose your audience. It is important to select who you really want and need as an audience so you can target your message. AJWS was facing an erosion of younger members. Its target audience was Millennials.

6. Choose the “voice.” Is your intent to make your message heart-wrenching, clever, provocative or funny? All of the above? At a panel in which I participated during Social Media Week last week, Buzzfeed President Jon Steinberg told attendees that digital content shouldn’t simply be about conveying “information.” It should also be the kind of content that gives people an excuse to connect (again) with their friends. Therefore, the content has to be fun or weild unusual emotional impact. “The stuff that goes viral is the kind of stuff that people can feel important or cool or relevant about, just by being associated with it,” Steinberg said. AJWS filmmakers chose humor as their “voice” because they knew humor was effective in messaging Millennials.

7. Think multimedia. Sure, you’re making a video. But don’t forget to think about the music and the still images and interviews you also might want to use. Does your organization have archival photographs you could use? Can you use illustrations if you can’t get much original footage? How about a simple animation? A podcast for narration? AJWS chose to do a series of short interviews with well-known people and edit them together. But you also can use still photographs and narration, Ken Burns-style -- or mix both stills and video.

8. Don't oversweat the equipment. For organizations operating on a shoestring, it's okay to keep it very simple. Nothing elaborate is required. Check out the video and camera functions of your phone. [Here are some smartphone video tips, to get you thinking about that option.] Or, borrow a Flipcam or dust off your old one. The Kodak zi8 pocket cam, the Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG10 or the lineup of Sony Bloggie Touch cams also offer acceptable options. [We especially like the audio features on the Samson Q3.] See if you can borrow something from your organization.

9. Map your scenes. Learn a bit about “storyboarding” — how to make a visual map of each shot. Where you want to “locate” your video? In your yard? Times Square? A studio? At your organization’s next fundraiser? At an environmental dump? An animal shelter? A performance space? What will this video need to show?

10. And finally, don’t agonize over the “putting-it-all-together” phase of things. Editing is a skill but one that you will be able to get the hang of in no time. Most software programs like iMovie and Movie Maker have simple editing tools, and there are some good Webinars offered by TechSoup and other organizations to walk you through some basic editing.

Go ahead. Involve your organization. Tell them it's time to visualize the mission statement, and get ready for a fascinating ride.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Urge Alerts

The British consumer research firm, trendwatching.com, issued a new report the other day to signal some recent shifts in consumer behavior, based on the observations of its hundreds of professional trend-spotters planted around the globe. Here are four "trends-to-watch" that are especially relevant to the use of social media and the cause-wired among us:

1. Urge alerts. Spurred by the Web and mobile phones, increasing numbers of people want their buying experiences to be based more on speed and location -- their location. Sure, it's not new that people want things “right now.” But the "where" is becoming increasingly important. So how can a company or a nonprofit satisfy these new expectations from the people who support them? According to trendwatching.com, it's all about getting better at keeping up with the accelerating pace of cultural change. For nonprofits, maybe it's as simple as creating a Web interface set up to track the progress of a donation. Consider Domino’s Pizza and its new digital “pizza tracer.” It allows customers to follow the progress of their order, from preparation to delivery, making delivery delays easier to bear and giving consumers a virtual peek into Domino's kitchen. Is there a digital way to help donors trace the flow of their donations or measure their impact? “While the appeal and influence of ‘now’ has been building for years, societal attitudes, sky-high consumer expectations and new technologies are currently converging in such a powerful way that brands truly have no choice but to go ‘real-time’,” the report says. The takeaway here for social change groups? Find a way to help your donors help you to measure the impact they're having, or risk losing them to groups that will.

2. Brand butlers: You’ve heard it before: serving is the new selling. But now, a nonprofit or a for-profit will need to start asking its customers or donors what it can do to help them -- rather than the other way around. Trendwatching.com says groups that reinvent themselves into “service organizations” (a shift from “broadcasting” to "assisting") could be more likely to survive in the months and years ahead. At least one nonprofit -- the Brooklyn Museum -- is already working the new angles. CTO Shelley Bernstein has developed a way for visitors to “check in” at their favorite exhibits, using their mobile phones. Once they check in this way, a museum staff member comes out to greet them in person -- and to assist them, if necessary, in their search for what interests them. Bernstein also is developing a way to help museum-goers to navigate the neighborhood outside the museum. Museum staff issues an ever-changing list of "staff picks" that might include tips on where to find the best piece of apple pie or bottle of wine in the area.

3. Mature-ialism. Consumers increasingly want authentic offline experiences. But now, "authentic" is being measured by the level of drama involved. "Consumers have a hunger to be exposed to raw and real life – in the form of much more honest conversations, more daring innovations, and more offline, risqué experiences," Trendwatching.com says. "They want brands that push the boundaries." Driving this? The spread of a more liberal, “anything goes” culture in the online world -- coupled with an ongoing shift in what constitutes "status" in today’s society, the firm says. “There has never been a bigger market for demanding and difficult experiences; people are upgrading their consumption to challenge themselves," the report says. "They’re craving authenticity and brands that, increasingly, have values that reflect their own.” For nonprofits, this means there may be an even bigger pool of potential donors waiting to “get their hands dirty” or wanting to have an offline experience that demands more of them to serve the needy -- a kind of reverse-Slacktivism. But consumers also still want to have fun, the company says. Why else are more charities staging contests asking people to, say, shave their beards for a cause, or lose 10 pounds so that poor kids can eat? [Think The Biggest Loser meets the local food bank.]

4. Mass mingling. Surging use of mobile 'smart phones' and the use of location-awareness games like Foursquare and Gowalla are creating ever-larger mobile social networks that convene around social events or a local business "happening." Next up? People organizing in this way around causes. "Like any consumer trend, mass mingling unlocks a human need in a new way," the report says. "It makes the act of interacting with others much easier." Consider organizing your nonprofit supporters around a volunteer event -- but do it via Foursquare or Facebook or Gowalla. And hold that event right away -- this afternoon. Be bold. Remember, one of the latest consumer trends is a respect for brands that dare to do new things -- right now.

Got any other examples of new consumer trends with special promise for the advocacy sector? Let us hear from you!

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration, Flying Team, by Miroslaw Pieprzyk)

Am I a (4) Square?

I’m a big fan of social media but I have to admit: I’m having a hard time getting into the habit of updating my whereabouts. Part of it is that my life just isn’t all that exciting: if there were a badge for Yet Another Before-Dawn Hour Spent Writing A Book or a badge for Marathon Blogging or Watching Rubicon, I would have long ago been anointed somebody’s Mayor – somewhere. At least once. [Dan Fletcher, writing in the current issue of TIME magazine, quips that the idea of updating his whereabouts “is a bit too much like having a pint-size version of my mother in my pocket, constantly prodding me for updates.”] Indeed, it’s kind of like that Twitteleh video that went viral last year spoofing Twitter, in which the Jewish mother uses tweets to prod her son with endless queries asking, Where Are You Going? Who Are You With? Are You Wearing a Sweater? and ... Who’s the Girl?

But a big part of it is that I just don’t see the benefits yet – at least not in the social change space. Sure, some nonprofits are starting to experiment. Kudos to Earthjustice, a nonprofit public interest law firm in the Bay Area, which has been asking BART riders this summer to “check in” with them on Foursquare. For every check-in, one of Earthjustice’s major donors is pledging $10 to help the nonprofit’s attorneys fight environmental pollution. So far, so good: marketing manager Ray Wan says the nonprofit has raised more than $10,000 for the cause, and has brought a crowd of people to the Earthjustice Web site that didn’t know about the group previously. [“We’re getting some amazing buzz from this,” Wan told me last month. “It’s an easy way to get people involved in helping us to fight for the environment.”]

Maybe so, but it’s all still about phoning it in -- what people used to call “click-and-give” in the ancient days of the Desktop, or what people have more recently called Slacktivism, a portmanteau formed out of the words “slacker” and “activism.” Even new media visionary Clay Shirky, speaking on this year’s conference circuit, has cited what he sees as a stubborn gap between online chatter about social action and real social action offline – a sort-of “talk” and “walk” gap that has yet to be widely recognized, if not bridged. [And it’s no wonder, perhaps. Josh Williams, the co-founder of Gowalla, says his company is thinking about how it can provide value beyond just the check-in, itself. “Sharing photographs, telling stories about a given location or whether someone’s had a romantic date there – that’s where things get really interesting,” Williams told TIME's Fletcher.]

I, for one, am holding out for something more. While sitting in the lobby of Austin’s Driskill Hotel last spring, the real potential of this medium became clear. One minute, the Driskill’s lobby was filled with seated, lounging SXSW conference-goers and the next minute, everyone sprang to their feet simultaneously, as if heeding a digital dog whistle, moving to the exits en masse. What happened? They all got the “memo” via Foursquare, an update compelling them to go to the next After Party (and they did, like moths to flame).

I went, too. But I didn’t stay very long. What I’m waiting for is the day or hour or minute when somebody sends me an update that not only tells me where they are, but why I should be there, too. An invitation that gives me a chance to do something locally -- but something outside my "chill" zone, like handing out free meals at the local homeless shelter for an hour, or reading a newspaper to nursing home residents in my neighborhood (and on my way over, bringing them a box of their favorite cookies).

Sure, I could do this without a prod via Foursquare and Gowalla. But if someone at my favorite charity were to invite me right now in an update, chances are I'd actually make it there. Today.

Skeptical? Go ahead, nonprofits. Encourage me to go for the Mayorship of, say, The Greater Harlem Nursing Home or the Atlanta Union Mission. I'm confident that I (and at least a couple dozen of my 3,000 closest online friends – and then some of their friends) would be delighted to compete.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: Russell Tate for istock.com)

Tweets Like Us

What do our Google queries and Tweets say about us? The short answer: We're a pretty divided lot in cyberspace -- but then, we kind of already knew that, right? [We're divided offline, too.]

What's new is that we can now tell what unites us, just from visualizing the knowledge we seek on Google and the hashtags we frequent on Twitter. A new data visualization tool called Web Seer, developed by two former IBM colleagues, provides some insights into what it is about the echo-chambers of today's identity politics that keeps us all arguing so much to begin with.

Skeptical? Let's have a look. Go to "Google Suggest" on your browser and click on "web search." Type in the word "why." Thanks to an "auto-suggest" feature that this and many other search engines now use, just typing in the word "why" produces a list of suggested, presumably popular completions. Today's list? "Why...did I get married?" is the most popular question, followed by, "Why is the sky blue?" and "Why do dogs eat grass?" ["Why don't you love me?" also ranks right up there with "Why did I leave Astoria?" -- a question that people who live in the New York City borough of Queens might especially appreciate.]

Amusing? Yes, and according to a new data visualization tool called Web Seer from Flowing Media, a new startup cofounded by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, searches like these also give the Web-curious "a little peek into our collective souls," says Viegas. "Exploring this Web Oracle can be quite revealing of society's fears, curiosities and prejudices."

Let's type in a new question, "Why doesn't he ... ?" When I did this, I got "call me" and "like me" and "ask me out." Sure enough, typing in the question, "Why doesn't she ... ?" surfaces similar completions. The differences, though, are the most telling in this case; Web Seer's visualization of the Google Suggest data spots the male-female divide instantly. Men tended to complete uniquely with "call me back?" and "just leave?" and "like me anymore?" while women appeared to be more interested in why he didn't "text back" and "want a relationship."

Viegas says deeper gender divisions become evident when it comes to family issues. The question "Is my daughter ... ?" is most likely to generate "pregnant" and "a virgin" and "gifted" and "austistic." Type in the question, "Is my son ... ?" and you'll likely get "a homosexual" and "on drugs." Says Wattenberg, "If you play around with this for a while, you start to see a portrait of people's anxieties and, I think, ultimately, a very clear gender division in society."

When Web Seer is applied to party politics, the divisions seem even more troubling. "Are Republicans ... richer than Democrats?" and "evil?" and are Democrats "socialists?" and "communists?" Viegas says that people in the analysis seem"confused, very much so, about party differences." But the areas of agreement, in this case, were just as revealing. According to Web Seer, people who typed questions into "Google Suggest" about either party asked if both Republicans and Democrats "are retarded" and "are morons" and "are destroying America" -- in other words, most who query "Google Suggest" about U.S. politics are similarly, deeply skeptical about the effectiveness and integrity of either party.

Okay, so now let's check out Twitter. Are we divided there, too? To find out, Viegas and Wattenberg analyzed Twitter trending topics over the 2010 Memorial Day weekend; after analyzing the photographs of those tweeting in some 10 Twitter trending conversations, ranging in topic from #wordsbeforedeath to #oilspill, the pair discovered that non-whites and whites were mostly equally involved in some conversations -- but not others. In this case, whites and non-whites were about equally involved in a conversation about #wordsbeforedeath -- but #cookout tweets were being written predominantly by non-whites and #oilspill tweets were being written, overwhelmingly, by whites.

The point here? "It's not to think, wow, there's racial segregation on the Web. We sort of knew that; the Web is a reflection of real life," said Viegas. "The point here is that this level of segregation is just one click away from the Twitter home page and it's happening in the trending topics. The fact that you can look at trending topics and be immersed in conversations that are so separate from one another is something to keep in mind."

Beyond simply insightful, these kinds of real-time "focus group" data visualizations are starting to be used by political groups, as well as by nonprofit causes seeking new supporters and social enterprises in search of some target markets or information about potential trouble spots beyond those which may seem obvious.

Got any further insights to share? Let us hear from you.

Here are Viegas and Wattenberg at the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum in June:

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration, top: istock.com)

Tourist Lane

For an hour last month, the flash-mob troupe, Improv Everywhere, used chalk to divide a Manhattan sidewalk into two walking lanes -- one for New Yorkers and one for tourists. Someone took a photograph (top), posted it online, and the "tourist lane" went viral -- with major media outlets, including CNN, doing brief stories. (So much for the Web's use as a new comedy venue.) But until recently, it wasn't clear who was responsible for the stunt. Improv Everywhere finally owned up to it during Internet Week, posting this "behind-the-scenes" video. The public art group's motto, We Cause Scenes, says it all. [Did we mention that NYC tourists have a reputation for walking slower than everyone else?]

Women Deliver

Watch this week's Women Deliver conference livestreamed from Washington, D.C. Featured speakers include Melinda Gates, United Nations Secretary-General Ban ki-moon and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank. The global conference runs through Wednesday in Washington, D.C.:

Watch live streaming video from womendeliver at livestream.com

Dark Waters

"More and more frequently these days, I'm seeing terrible things underwater," says National Geographic photojournalist Brian Skerry in this video of his recent talk at TED, posted today:

Swarms 2

There are growing numbers of people who are organizing themselves online into social action groups, and these groups are about to start making a much bigger mark offline, a panel of social media experts agreed today during the final day of this week's TechCrunch Disrupt conference in Manhattan.

Sure, online social networks are already having an impact offline -- from pressuring schools to serve kids healthier lunches to mobilizing support for anti-establishment candidates in state and local elections. But all of that is just for starters, panelists agreed: people have only just begun to tap the potential of digital networks to affect change offline as the Net becomes more "social."

"With existing networks and start-ups, it's becoming easier to build a movement," said Chris Hughes, the developer of President Obama's Web site and social media campaign. Meetup Co-founder and CEO Scott Heiferman added: "We're starting to use the Net to move off the Net, in the spirit of disrupt, to ... enable people to become more powerful and ... reinvent the world."

To underscore the point, Heiferman announced the launch of Meetup Everywhere, an expanded Meetup platform that Heiferman described as "an easy way for any organization or company or cause to catalyze Meetups everywhere about themselves." So far, he said, Meetup Everywhere has 15 different launch partners, including the social marketing guru Seth Godin, who two days ago asked his social network to hold a Seth Godin Meetup using Meetup Everywhere. The result? As of today, Seth Godin Meetups have self-organized in 672 cities around the world and plan to meet up on June 19. And that's not all. Etsy, the luxury crafts start-up, has Meetups scheduled in 254 cities, and The Huffington Post has organized "green Meetups" in 110 cities so far to talk about the BP oil spill. Groupon and Foursquare also are using the new Everywhere platform to catalyze company-hosted events among their friends and followers. "This is more important than the iPad because the most amazing things happen when people meet up," Heiferman gushed, plugging his new initiative from the stage.

Heiferman also predicted that the 2012 state and federal elections will "look a lot more like the Tea Party movement." He said there are 600 local Tea Party Meetup groups "and what's interesting about them is that each has a self-contained, self-organizing system for leadership. With the Tea Party, leadership is distributed. Some would call it scary but I think this is something to look at about the way the future will work" -- for political candidates as well as for nonprofit causes and businesses seeking to engage support for their products and ideas.

Key takeaways on using social media to mobilize change:

1. It's not enough to make it easier for people to share online, Hughes said. "You have to create a whole new culture and eco-system of sharing." For example, Hughes said, the Obama campaign created 1,500 Youtube videos during the span of the election cycle "but there were 100 times that number of YouTube videos, or more, created by everyday people who were out there for Obama because they understood the campaign was about sharing and having their own voice and responsibility." Another key? "Relationship-building is also important," Hughes said. "It's not enough to have people speaking and saying 'I care, I care, I care.' You also need to build a network that enables those people to connect to other people who care about similar causes."

2. The money happens last in online fundraising. "First," says Hughes, "you connect people, then you foster relationships with them. Only then will people come in and give 15 or 20 bucks."

3. Social media can help you to "build your own machine" to change the status quo, says Reshman Saujani, a congressional candidate for the 14th District of New York, who has been organizing her campaign for the last 18 months, mostly on social networks. "I believe technology can really disrupt the Establishment," she told the panel. "Normally, you need to belong to a political party or club that brings endorsements, contributions and visibility ... and outsiders, therefore, find it hard to run." But social media change that, Saujani said. She is testing a new social media organizing platform created by Jim Gilliam(Brave New Films) called pro.act.ly, which Saujani described as being "Obama 3.0." She said "we knew that we would need 30,000 votes to win our campaign on September 14 and we knew we would not get the support of the party or the labor unions, so we had to build our own machine." Pro.act.ly, she said, enables movement organizers to look up any single supporter and learn instantly how many people in their networks are supporting a campaign. "It measures the intensity of their commitment," she said. It's a kind of digital dashboard to community organizers. "Jim (Gilliam) wants to give Pro.act.ly to a lot of people in 2012 who want to run all across the country and get them to change Congress," she said.

4. Tie online to offline at every opportunity. Meetup's Heiferman said there are now nearly 15,000 Meetups going on each week "on almost everything" -- with less than 1 percent of them tech-related. "The real opportunity of social media," Hughes said, "is for people who don't have an infrastructure or an established entity." Added Heiferman: "Mass engagement, on many fronts, is becoming a reality -- faster than you think."

What do you think? Wishful thinking or growing force?

-- Marcia Stepanek

[This post first appeared on Justmeans.com and runs here with permission]
[Illustration: istock.com]

Choose a Different Ending

There are a variety of ways that social advocacy groups use videos -- to break news, tout their passion and thought leadership, and explain complex issues. All focus on storytelling in traditional video formats.

But there's a new type of cause video starting to gain notice as an effective way to engage new supporters. It's interactive -- your supporters and would-be supporters decide what happens next. It's a type of video that combines good storytelling with the interactivity of a video game. Here's an example, called Choose a Different Ending, developed for the UK nonprofit, droptheweapons.org, to fight street violence. It was shot by British filmmaker Simon Ellis.

What do you think? Might this be an effective way for your cause to engage supporters? Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Fight Club

Actor Edward Norton today officially launched Crowdrise, a new social media site and for-profit social enterprise that aims to transform the supporters of good causes into their most ardent fundraisers.

The site is the latest entry into what has become a crowded online field for charity fundraising. But uniquely, it offers its most active users "points" for their engagement. For every dollar raised for a cause earns users a Crowdrise point, which can be used to win prizes donated by top brands, such as laptops and iPods from Apple or windbreakers from North Face.

Crowdrise [its motto is if you don't give back, no one will like you] was developed by the 40-year-old star of movies including The Illusionist and Fight Club to give people and organizations "a new way to set up fundraising pages without having to spend great sums" (or having to buy fundraising software). "People use Twitter or Facebook because it's a way to share their personal narrative," Norton said in an interview. "We wanted to give people a chance to also share what they care about in the world, a platform to say, 'These are the causes I care about; I am volunteering. Sponsor me.'"

Each fundraising campaign that is created on the platform sets a fundraising goal and tracks progress in real-time. Once a campaign is created, the "host" then asks for donations using Facebook, Twitter and email to activate his or her social networks into donating any amount, of any size. Each campaign also offers non-members and non-supporters the chance to join the cause and help to fundraise for it using their own social networks.

The site originated out of Norton's Massai Marathon, an effort he kicked off last year to protect wildlife in Kenya and Tanzania, and which raised $1.2 million in less than eight weeks, mostly from small donations. "We want to convert social networking from just being social into substantive, productive communication with action," Norton told The Wall Street Journal earlier this week. "Instead of telling the world what you're eating for breakfast, you can use social networking to do something that's meaningful."

It's not the first celebrity fundraising-site-for-good: actor Kevin Bacon launched sixdegrees.org some years ago to offer people a new way to leverage celebrity-power for their causes. It's also not the first fundraising site to let anyone create campaigns and leverage their social networks for donations. [Think GlobalGiving, among others.] But Norton's site uniquely offers participants incentives in the form of points and prizes. The first round of prizes will be awarded July 31.

"Technology has allowed for a kind of engagement between people with a public life and the people who are interested in them, which is entirely new and potentially very powerful," Norton said. Organizations already signed up to use the site for fundraising include Oceana, City Year, the Alzheimer's Association, Paul Farmer's Partners in Health, and Malaria No More.

Norton is no celebrity-come-lately when it comes to social advocacy. His father, an environmentalist with the Nature Conservancy, was an attorney for the Wilderness Society when Norton was a boy; his grandfather was an early advocate for affordable housing and set up the nonprofit Enterprise Foundation in Manhattan to help the poor. Norton, himself, is on the board of that foundation and has been working quietly for years on environmental and anti-poverty issues. (In 2006, Norton founded Enterprise Community Partners, Inc.'s Solar Neighbors Program, which negotiated an agreement with BP Solar to provide solar-power technology to low-income homeowners in Los Angeles, helping dozens of families to cut their energy bills by more than half. Each time a celebrity or public figure buys a home solar system, BP donates a full system to a family. so far, the company has donated nearly 75 systems.)

A spokesperson for Crowdrise said Norton set up the site as a for-profit social enterprise, in part to insure its sustainability over time and to encourage other social businesses. "The things that seem monumental or monolithic are the ones that you have to take on, Norton told me in a 2007 interview for Contribute Magazine. "Sometimes, even just the act of beginning something is the integral first step because a good idea has a tendency to snowball."

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph: Courtesy Contribute Magazine)

Greening Hope

Environmentalist Paul Hawken, the author of Blessed Unrest, urged fellow social entrepreneurs and green activists attending the Skoll World Forum in Oxford "not to despair" -- despite many challenges and barriers to building a more eco-friendly society.

"What you hear again and again in the environmental social justice movement is that we are too late, we're not doing enough, we failed at Copenhagen -- a litany of failure," Hawken said, then quipped: "I think this is the only movement that circles the wagons and shoots inwards, you know?"

Hawken, the CEO of OneSun Solar, a solar energy technology company, used his keynote address at the Skoll forum to caution its nearly 750 attending social entrepreneurs gainst losing perspective in their struggle for a greener planet. "The way you win," he said, "is not to be on a team where the coach is depressed by the difficulty of the endeavor. The way you win is to recognize that what you are doing is extraordinary." He added: "Copenhagen (climate talks) weren't organized to succeed. What did succeed was the information that got exchanged, the new people energized and organized around the issues and the catalyzing of new proposals, new solutions and new ideas."

Is the challenge to save the environment daunting? Yes, absolutely, Hawken said. But the goals are not impossible. He likened today's social movement leaders to the brave souls behind the abolitionist movement in 18th century Britain, who sought an end to slavery. It was a movement, Hawken said, that was started by "a couple of Quakers and Anglicans...What was so extraordinary about it was that it was the first time people organized themselveson behalf of people they didn't know and who they would never know." Such behavior was viwed as being odd then, he said, but is accepted widely today.

"The thing is that today, we (activists) have taken on the whole tamale," Hawken said. "It's not like we're trying to fix one thing. We're trying to fix the whole thing, the whole industrial system -- every node, every aspect, every part of it needs to be addressed and re-imagined. If we are winning, then we are doing something wrong because that would be playing too small. We are going to be defeated again and again. We are going to get laughed at. That's how we know we're on the right track. This is big."

Hawken ended his remarks by saying that "anyone can make despair possible but to make hope possible takes real genius and real heart." Hawken received a standing ovation.

The Skoll World Forum continues through Friday. Watch this space for continuing highlights.

--Marcia Stepanek

Digital 'Dog Whistle'

More than once last week at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, I'd be sitting in a restaurant or in a hotel lobby with some colleagues, only to see nearly everyone within eyeshot suddenly stand up and start moving toward the exits, simultaneously. We'd go, too, ending up a few blocks away, or across the street, along with everyone else.

What was fascinating was that this wasn't the usual conference "pack" mentality. Our smart phones had made sure we had "gotten the memo." They told us when to go and where to go -- and then, who else might be there when we arrived. For many attendees, the SxSW conference was a first opportunity to try out location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla and experience the sensation of location-awareness media first-hand.

[New York Times writer David Carr described the sensation at SxSW, writing in the Times today that "it was striking to see the digital location effect in the wild, with people reacting to an unseen dog whistle and moving en masse, on command."]

How does it work? Once you arrive at a location, you "check in" and see a list of people who are already there; Foursquare was ranking the most popular locations by the number of check-ins during the conference. Local merchants were handing out digital, branded "badges" to those who showed up -- and free beer or other perks were being given to those who showed up the most often. Twitter launched a location-aware app during the conference and Facebook will soon follow suit.

Location, simply put, changes a lot -- from marketing to social action. [The potential to organize volunteers this way was explored again this year on some of SxSW's panels.] Merging location and the Web means that most of us can walk around with a smart phone in our pockets that not only tell others where we are but also plugs into the Net to share that information, merge it with online databases and spit out who else is in the immediate vicinity that we might know.

But location-aware services -- though still a relatively new form of social media -- are doing more now than simply testing organizers' ability to move a crowd for entertainment [see Where Ware in Cause Global last week]. They're also testing new ways for crowds to help charitable causes with donated money and services: following the Haiti earthquake, Loopt announced that for every user who checked in from a Panera, Chipotle or a Whole Foods, it would donate $1 towards Haitian relief, with 50 cents going to the Red Cross and the rest to Doctors Without Borders. Not to be outdone, Gowalla donated $50 to the Red Cross for every user who checked in from one of three locations in San Francisco at certain times.

CauseWorld, meanwhile, is a location-based social network that hands out "Karma Points" each time a user checks in at a participating location. The free iPhone and Android app lets users convert their Karma Points into real dollars and donate them to to a list of causes that corporate sponsors Kraft Foods and Citi have designated. The CauseWorld community has, so far, earned $6 million worth of Karma Points for the homeless in Haiti.

No question, there is more potential, still, for groups to use location aware technology to move groups to benefit social causes. Backers say CauseWorld is an example of how brands can combine social media with cause marketing in new ways to deliver new value to customers and employees, alike. No doubt CauseWorld is just the first of such initiatives.

Are you part of any new projects that use location-aware technology-for-a-cause? How would you rate the potential for location-aware media to promote social action? Employee and consumer engagement?

-- By Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Matt Hertel for istock.com)

Where Ware

It's all about location-smart social media this year at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin. Dozens of new start-ups launching there this weekend offer new ways to help people connect geographically in real-time, on the fly, using their mobile phones and devices. But just some of these new start-ups use social media for social good.

Here are a few very new start-up social enterprises which have, so far, triggered some buzz among the more than 5,000 SxSW attendees (many want to "discover" the next Twitter or Foursquare):

* Vicarious.ly is a real-time, location-based information stream that aggregates the movements of people in Austin attending SxSW -- and will soon be able to do the same in different cities around the United States and the world. [Go ahead, try it. It's like a visual Twitter on steroids.] SimpleGeo, the startup that owns Vicarious.ly, partnered with eight different location companies -- including Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite and Twitter -- and the result is a fast-moving "location stream" of data. So far, much of the activity represents check-ins from either foursquare or Gowalla. Down the road, founders hope to help nonprofits and NGOs build new ways to map crowd movements in environmental or political crises, so as to boost the delivery efficiency of basic goods and services.

* CauseWorld is a free iPhone and Android app that enables users to check in at places but when you do, participating brands (including Kraft Foods and Citi) will give money to a charity of your choice. The concept is to turn the current craze for location-based check-in games into money for those in need. This week at SxSW, CauseWorld and TechCrunch, the tech news blog, are partnering to offer double "karma" points to people who check in to one of over 50 participating venues in Austin. There are no purchases required. "Players" just need to check in to the right venues to earn the points.

* SparkHelp, a project that Mashable is supporting for the Pepsi Refresh SxSW Challenge, a competition for $50,000 in start-up funding. Founders describe SparkHelp as "a foursquare meets Craigslist" application. "The idea is simple," says Brian Milner, co-founder. "Anyone can place a call for help and anyone can answer that call. Help can be sought for anything: fence repair, car repair, computer work, dog-walking, etc." SparkHelp is seeking funding to build is Website as well as the apps for all of the major mobile platforms needed to match someone with time or skills with others who need them -- and all in real-time, based on where they are now.

* Giiv bills itself as a startup that's all about "texting with benefits." It's a mobile "micro-gifting" platform that lets people instantly send gifts to friends and those in need. How does it work? Find a gift you want to give from among those listed on Giiv's site and then enter the intended recipient's mobile number with a note. Giiv then texts that person a giiv code, which he or she can then redeem for real merchandise or services. Globalgiving and Tom's Shoes are among the first "gift" items listed on the start-up's beta site. (There is a 99-cent processing fee added on to the amount of the gift.)

* Glass is another real-time Web company, but this one lets users place notes on top of any Website, so that contacts "can see your thought together with the moment that inspired it, in context, allowing you to share the experience of being there." Think of it as a clear, digital Post-it note. "It's a virtual sheet of glass that lies over the entire Internet that's yours to affect," founders say. "You can share your thoughts about anything on the Web, right in the moment, by literally placing notes, highlighting text and even placing pictures and videos on top of any Website and share those thoughts with only those you choose." Think of it as a personalized form of "augmented reality" that lets people share a moment and a thought together as an experience. Founders say the application promotes information-exchange and promotes transparency, with the potential for social advocacy organizations looking to quickly share information about specific locations or get up to speed faster in crises locations from those on the ground.

Other unique location-aware ware at SxSW this year? Check out the "Twitter mandala."

Ironically, perhaps, these and other location-tracking platforms come amid some first-day conference sessions devoted to spirited discussions of online privacy, which conference kick-off keynoter danah boyd defined as "being not about hiding your information but about being able to control it in different situations."

Watch this space for updates.

-- By Marcia Stepanek

Mashtape

Check out this excerpt from the award-winning documentary Playing for Change: Peace Through Music. Producers used social media to invite street musicians from around the globe to collaborate in song:

Mo' Real

A small group of social activists, journalists, and filmmakers has begun using Second Life to start covering the news. Leading the charge is Draxtor Despres [aka Bernhard Drax, a 38-year-old, Munich-born machinima hobbyist living in Pacific Grove, California]. Drax recently posted a report on YouTube telling how the incoming Obama Administration will use Second Life to help engage the public over health care reform. Here's that report, virtual video-style, below. [NOTE: Draxtor is the suited avatar with headphones.]



Drax, who has been experimenting with Second Life as a medium for news for nearly the past year, received international recognition in mid-December for his efforts [and recognition for Second Life as a new information medium] during the Paris celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There, Drax was awarded an "Every Human Has Rights" media award for his SL report, "Virtual Guantanamo," a feature story on the "virtual Gitmo" built in Second Life by filmmaker Nonny del la Pena and Peggy Weil, a professor at the University of Southern California. Their work, "Gone Gitmo," offers viewers an immersive experience about what it's like (no, really) to be a prisoner at Gitmo. See Drax's award-winning report, below:



Drax uses screen capture software to film events and gather interviews. Douglas Thomas, the director of USC's Network Culture Project, predicts an expansion this year in the use of the medium in education, journalism, and social advocacy, saying many nonprofits and social advocates also might start using Second Life as a new storytelling medium for encouraging public engagement in their causes. Says Drax: "How can we improve the real world? That's what I'm trying to focus on in Second Life." Drax will start filing reports next month from this virutal world for PBS's Frontline World. Said Drax, in accepting the award in Paris: "I'm proud I've gotten this award but it's a signal that this is viable, that this is legitimate, that this [SL] is not a game."

For more on the development of virtual worlds for social change, check out Games for Change co-founder Suzanne Seggerman and her work by clicking here to see her talk at the recent Pop!Tech 2008. Also check out Contribute Magazine's special report, The Cause Web, [September/October 2007], chiefly the story, Pixelanthropy, about the trend toward nonprofit activism in Second Life.