Cause Week 2013

It's Cause Week again in New York, that wonky week-long stretch of mid-September when a perfect storm of three global-class, do-gooder gatherings floods Manhattan.

[Concurrent with the opening sessions of the United Nations General Assembly, Cause Week also means the start of the annually high-powered, invitation-only Clinton Global Initiative in Midtown, as well as the run of the annual Social Good Summit , the social-media-for-social-change crowd's Millennial version of CGI that's held across town.]

What all of these events have in common—besides their ability to paralyze Midtown traffic—are A-list attendees and speakers from all sectors pushing new policies, new partnerships, and tech-driven social innovation. From Barack Obama, Bono, Sean Penn, and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, to Queen Rania of Jordan, philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates, and Facebook's Sheryl Sandburg, the goal of these thinkfests is to take stock of the world's most pressing social problems, and to rally society's brightest minds to work more effectively for solutions.

First to launch this week is the Social Good Summit, which is being livestreamed to 120 locations around the world in 8 languages. Among top takeaways so far:

* Internet freedom is under growing attack around the world. Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning human rights activist, former Harvard scholar and the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, warned #2030NOW attendees of a "crackdown on civil society" by governments around the world. "It's clear that a lot of governments are now sharing worst practices on how to crack down on civil society," she said. They are doing this "to impede the kind of connectivity that can occur virtually, even as they close off public streets and squares." The goal: to dissuade cause-wired activists from using social media and other methods to demand human rights and economic reforms. "Governments are getting more and more sophisticated at shutting down the Internet, and are blocking, filtering, and using technology to trace human rights activists" for retribution, Power added. "They are aware of the explosion in civil society and of the power of social media. It is time to sound the alarm."

* Millennials' passion for "good" products is growing.  Tina Wells, CEO and Founder of Buzz Marketing Group, cited "conscious consumption" as the No. 1 trend driving Millennials today. "Millennials don't just want to buy things that are cool. They want to buy things they love that also contribute to the world in a positive way," Wells says. That's not news, of course. But 80 percent of Millennials are now spending more than three hours a day online, and brands are getting smarter at working with the cause-wired online, inviting them to participate in conversations around the issues that are important to them. Wells is working with the United Nations to elevate the voice and input of youth globally via MyWorld, a UN initiative that enables youth to participate more broadly in the conversations around the UN Millennium Goals. "Millennials understand there is room for digital nonprofits and for-profit organizations to work together for change," Wells said. Note to social marketers and nonprofits: shared experiences equals trust equals consumption and support.

* Drones aren't all bad. Most people would associate them with military strikes, but a handful of activists are finding ways to use drones and tech surveillance capabilities to promote peace and stability in countries experiencing conflict. John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, is working in partnership with Google and satellite companies "to get eyes on remote locations in conflict zones, where there is no other way to verify that human rights abuses are occurring." Prendergast said that monitoring for mass grave sites and rebel movements, for example, can help warn innocent civilians and prevent human rights abuses from occurring in some areas. Kevin Kennedy, chief of integrated training services at the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support, said his office is using drones for good in four countries—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, and Haiti, to help monitor public health and rebel movements.

* The news is going social. It's no longer enough to be informed by the media. A couple of new journalism startups also want you to act on the story you just saw, read, watched, or Tweeted. "I think any of us who are Millennials would argue that if you have a microphone plugged into an amplifier, it's wrong of you not to sing," says Ian Somerhalder, co-founder of RYOT.org, a new news platform that drives readers and viewers to get involved in embedded action steps that appear at the end of each article. "We take readers to the next step with calls to action," Somerhalder added. "No longer do you have to read an article and that's it. Dead. Social media engages people. It has changed the world and we're all here witnessing it, and we're all part of it, and it's a really phenomenal thing."

* There is a new Africa rising. Two social entrepreneurs working with social media to fuel support for their organizations in Africa talked extensively about the rapidly growing entrepreneurial scene there. "Charity? Rather than support the traditional NGOs in Africa, support the African social entreprenuer," urged Magatte Wade, founder and CEO of Tiossan, a cosmetics startup that uses proceeds to benefit local education. Teddy Ruge, an Africa-based entrepreneur and a leader of the social enterprise movement there, agreed that local African entrepreneurs are reshaping their own communities for the better, and it is time for traditional aid organizations to work with these new innovators—and to hear their input—rather than drive their own agendas without collaboration.

* Traditional nonprofit philanthropy is dead, reimagined by social media.  In a world of social media, philanthropy and nonprofits can no longer remain in fortresses and operate without partnering with businesses and governments. "Philanthropy needs to collaborate more across sector and with supporters," said Jean Case of the Case Foundation. "We need to help nonprofits master social media and help them to communicate with these tools. When we think of philanthropy, our definition is any effective effort that promotes human progress, which doesn't mean we should get just anyone in the tent. We need talent and help from companies, too. The traditional sense of charitable giving is not where we should stop, because stopping would mean we're not using all the tools in our toolbox." One recent attempt at new engagement: feedbacklabs.org, a mobile app that asks nonprofits what they're trying to do and helps them measure their effectiveness by putting them in touch directly with their aid recipients. Another sign of change? The ACLU is now raising its digital voice, busting out of the gate with soon-to-be-launched multimedia campaign called "My Big Gay Illegal Wedding." The campaign asks supporters to help it find and marry five couples in hotspot states. Think crowdsourcing for mobilization. "The thing about social media is that it demands boldness and excitement," Romero said. "Social media makes us all activists. We can redefine who we are."


The Social Good Summit ends tonight, just as CGI begins. Keep current with the highlights. Follow us @CauseGlobal for coverage and watch this space for updates.

-By Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph: Ripped posters on a wall, Carrer de Bailen, in Barcelona, Spain, by Rene Mansi)

Crackdown

At this week's Social Good Summit in New York, Samantha Power, the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, told conferees that governments around the world are increasingly cracking down on Web activists "and it's time to sound the alarm." She said social media have the potential to counteract these forces against Internet freedom, but urged young conferees to "team up to make your voices heard."

What follows is an edited transcript of that interview, conducted from the #2030NOW stage by Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore:

Q: Your entire career has been about the importance of human rights. Why do those things matter so much?
I was very moved when I was in college, when I saw for the first time the footage from Tiananmen Square. I was working as a intern in the sports department of the CBS affiliate in Atlanta at the time, and I was taking notes on the Braves game and I looked up, and there was Tiananmen and the crushing of this democratic movement and moment. So that kind of got in my head, looking at what the citizens in China were trying to do for their country, for their children and their grandchildren. And then when I graduated from college, I was struck by images in The New York Times of emaciated men behind barbed wire, again in Europe—just 50 years after the Holocaust. It was a time when the Bosnian Serbs were cracking down brutally, committing ethnic cleansing, and I thought there has got to be something we can do about this.

Q: Are people more informed or less informed in a world of social technologies?
Well, as tech evolves, it feels like people are alert to the risk of seeing and hearing only what they want to see and hear and not, necessarily, what they need to be discovering, serendipitously. On one hand, we've become more insulated and cocooned, and other the other hand, more and more people are trying to seek out greater connections. There are inconvenient topics—topics and issues we wouldn't voluntarily really seek out because they're depressing or disempowering because of the magnitude of the badness. I think a lot of us have those emotions. Syria is the latest example of that. It's just so heartbreaking, and you can imagine why young people might not want to spend a lot of time watching videos of people getting gassed by chemical weapons. But I think technology also can be a force for good, a dream. It's a force multiplier like nothing we've seen.

Q: Is social media and communication technology fundamentally pro- democracy and civil society, or is it neutral?
We've got examples on both sides of the ledger. Governments are growing more and more sophisticated at shutting down the Internet, blocking, filtering, using technology to trace human rights activists. There was that devastating incident not long ago in Homs, Syria, where Marie Colvin, one of the greatest war correspondents of the last century was we think, tracked down by the coordinates of her cellphone and then struck by the Assad regime and killed. I just came from a meeting with civil society activists to talk about the use of technologies to impede rather than expand democratic accountability and civic activism. This one young Syrian activist was describing that Assad has used SCUD missiles and fired them in Syria, on his own people. He said it takes 8- to 15 minutes for these missiles to land from the time of launch. Young activists in Syria now have people organized to text ahead if they see anything in the launch phase, then text the coordinates of that launcher from where that launch occurred, which helps activists predict the missiles' path. Texters then send their messages into a central hub, and people can see where this SCUD is likely to land, and when—so they can get out of the way. It's an example of the creativity and ways in which people are using digital technology. And here's another example. I traveled with the President a couple of years ago, to India, and there's this amazing web site there called "I Paid a Bribe" and it's people sharing their personal stories around the indignity of having to have paid a bribe. Social media is good so far at creating communities of concern in this way. The Satellite Sentinel Project, which George Clooney and John Prendergast are using, gets companies to donate satellite time as resources so activists can document mass graves in parts of the world that are not necessarily accessible to humanitarian organizations. So technology has an upside and a downside, and it's all about how you use it.

Q: To what extent is government responsible? What is the role of the civilian and what is the role of government?
I think it depends on the situation. Citizens have the capacity, as they did in Darfur, to put an issue on the map. Young people and people in the faith community made Darfur matter in Washington and did impressive fundraising using tech. Once people get moved by what they see or what they're exposed to,  social media can be a great way to pool resources and get them to people in need. ...We were talking a minute ago about Twitter. I just joined but already I'm seeing the power of it. In the old days, you'd almost have to stage a press conference to get your voice out there, even as the UN Ambassador. But not anymore.

Q: Are you increasingly using Twitter to break news and decisions on social media?
A: I think that because you can move information so quickly, it's very easy to do it that way. But I also think that all forms of media still do remain relevant. Sometimes doing things so quickly is not always the way to get out the nuances of a policy, which is challenging anyway—especially on issues that are as complicated as many we work on. But when it comes to putting pressure on a government that has a mission here or an embassy there, you can use social media to connect with people in European countries or in African countries and have them raise issues that are critical. There are ways to build coalitions, particularly around the fate of civil society and the prospects for human rights, that just didn't exist when we were relying solely on the mainstream media.

Q: How are global activists engaging with tech to get their voices heard?
Tech is a major piece of how they connect with one another but this crackdown on civil society by many governments around the world is very sad, whether it's shutting down the Internet or blocking Twitter or blocking Facebook or, just as egregiously, using plain old-fashioned laws and regulations to restrict foreign funding to NGOs or to inhibit the space that activists have to protest publicly, or to crack down on their freedom to associate. So tech is not the only problem, and it's not the only solution. this strangulation by regulation can also be very effective. We used to talk in development and in human rights about best practices, about how we can push for best practices. It's now clear that a lot of these governments are now sharing worst practices on how to crack down on civil society, how to use the tools of tech to impede the kind of connectivity that can occur virtually, even as they close off public spaces and public squares. They're migrating those kinds of practices that they've used over time to the Internet, and to the social media space, and we're pushing governments in our meetings now to bring civil society back to the table.

Q: How can individuals get involved? What actions can they take?
A: We've seen activists in Haiti, for example, famously creating crisis maps and crowd-sourcing, where you could document who was buried where by virtue of people using technology to track them. We've seen tech being used in the U.S. and also in Kenya, during elections, to stop fraud. These kinds of things are very important. Tech also is a great feedback loop. Now that I'm on Twitter, if I give a speech and people are telling me that it didn't make sense when I said something about this, or didn't square with what I'd earlier said about that, it's not aways pleasant reading but it's important to hear. I don't think that leaders before these tools were able to have such direct and rapid sharing with the people they service. This is important.

Q: Finally, what's the outlook for civil society in the future, by 2030?
I think right now the trend lines are not positive. The truth of the matter is that many governments, in the last five years, have become more sophisticated in their response to cause-wired movements by the people to get their voices heard. More than 40 governments now are restricting freedom of speech and association and religion—the basic stuff. These governments are sharing worst practices but they are doing so because they are aware of the explosion in civil society and of the power of social media. Who will win going forward? I've always been on the citizens' side but right now, a crackdown on civil society is a pattern across the globe. It's time to sound the alarm. If we can get other like-minded governments and citizens and NGOs and foundations to team up to contest this worrying trend, then it won't be a close call between anachronistic governments trying to crack down on basic human dignity and the power of the people. History shows who's going to win that one.

-Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph: Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore interview Samantha Power (left). Photo by Mashable with permission.)  

Crowdfunding 3.0

It's definitely not news that social media have democratized philanthropy, enabling people not previously part of the nation's wealthy "giving class" to start participating at multiple levels.

The digital mass philanthropy movement is definitely making a mark: in the past several years, nearly $1 billion has been raised for good causes via crowdfunding—on platforms ranging from the iconic Kickstarter to somewhat newer players with names like Hope Mob, Start Some Good, Crowdrise and Indiegogo. Micro-donations coming in last year for arts projects via Kickstarter, for example, exceeded the total given in 2012 by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

But many social cause organizations and nonprofits are still very new to these platforms, with some still trying to figure out how best to tackle a crowdfunding campaign of their own.

As part of this past week's Social Media Week NYC 2013 events roster, CauseGlobal assembled a panel of crowdfunding pioneers last week during Social Media Week to talk about what works and what doesn't. Among the panelists were: Crowdrise Co-Founder and CEO Robert Wolfe; Hope Mob Founder and CEO Shaun King; Kickstarter's Arts Projects Coordinator Stephanie Pereira; social media consultant and author Geoff Livingston, and Mary Ann Wincorkowski, the coordinator and chief strategist of an Indiegogo campaign staged successfully last fall to raise more than $64,000 and reopen the struggling Word Up Books community bookshop in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood.

Contemplating a crowdfunding campaign of your own? For those of you who had to miss last week's event, here are the panelists' Top 20 bits of advice:

1. Create a sense of urgency. Says Crowdrise CEO Robert Wolfe: "Tell people they have a short amount of time to act on your campaign, and spell out what will not happen or be missing if they fail to act quickly."

2. Tell a shareable story. Most causes are inherently urgent in nature, but without creating a story to convey a sense of urgency, your campaign might fall short of the mark. Instead, tell and share a gripping story of a local individual or group. "Find new ways to clarify the stakes for the people from which you are asking support," Wolfe said. "Make it about the 'here' and the 'now in their sphere of experience" so that sharing it is about sharing the familiar, or that which is knowable and verifiable.

3. Don't wait to build your social network; engage your core influencers early. This is basic, but worth repeating. Says Wolfe: "Treat your crowdfunding campaign like a community acquisition and activation exercise, and measure engagement from the start." Says consultant Livingston: "Keep watering the garden to build your community by sharing with them way before, during, and long after your first crowdfunding campaign. Share what other people are doing in the sector and congratulate them for what they are doing to achieve the causes you're helping. Celebrate their work for the cause, and they will celebrate yours. Share your work and everyone else's like crazy. Make it about the cause and the business of being involved, not about an organization."

4. Get training on the crowdfunding platform you've chosen to use. "Don't assume you know it or can simply pick up on your own what the platform can do," says Livingston. "Get deep training on it so you can maximize measurement and capture community as well as engage in to the max." Training also helps fundraisers understand better how to shape their campaign to the types of supporters they have, and the social media platforms they're already using.

5. Plan to invest 10-30 hours of staff time. All panelists said it takes a core team of volunteers and staff people to pull off a successful crowdfunding campaign. Says Word Up's Wincorkowski: "You can't run a campaign run by three people in a corner. You want to engage everyone in the organization in some way, and you want to work with people who already have a connection and a stake in the outcome."

6. Build trust early and often. Don't promise what you cannot deliver. Set realistic crowdfunding targets low enough so it's a pretty sure thing you will exceed them, and find other ways to reassure people that you and your campaign is trustworthy and "for real." Hope Mob, for example, offers to verify the stories it tells about the fundraising targets on its platform. "We're pretty rigorous that way," says CEO King. "If you don't have a verified story on our platform, you cannot receive a check." King tells of a campaign on Hope Mob that had sought to raise money for a child's hearing aid, but instead of sending a check to the organization after the successful end to the campaign, Hope Mob bought a hearing aid for the child with the money collected and reported that it did this to build trust among donors. "Everyone who donated gave a percentage of the cost of that hearing aid," King says. "This is about trust. For donors who don't have the covering of a charity they know and can trust, we offer them our ability as an organization to deliver and to report back."

7. Don't wait too long to get started. Says King: "People often wait too long to start something that is in their minds and hearts to do. Trust that you probably have everything you need to start right now. It doesn't matter what stage of life you are in, people always feel they're missing something. You never have enough time, right? You never have enough money. But the truth is this: you never will have more time than what you have now. Go get started!"

8. Don't just offer incentives, offer the right kind of incentives. "What you're offering in exchange for people's buy-in should be relevant to your project," says Kickstarter's Pereira. "Think about commissioning a community of local visual artists for some original artwork, or instead of sending donors a movie poster, think of an experience you can offer them, instead—like an invitation to a local premiere, or the opportunity to help sponsor a special showing."

9. Measure. Use your campaign to build your community—not just for one crowdfunding project, but for future support over time. Use an analytical tool and set up a dashboard to monitor the levels and nature of the online community you're attracting to the campaign. If you don't have one, get one. Watch it. Use it to drive future decisions about the kinds of stories you tell and the social media platforms you're choosing to get the word out and build support.

10. Set realistic goals. Says King: "We see people, all the time—because their dreams and hearts are so big—set impossible goals and they often never hit them and then get discouraged. I always tell people to set the goal much much lower than what you think you will need. That builds credibility and encourages internal discipline and serious budgeting." Adds Livingston: "Underestimate rather than shoot too high. You want to blow past your target, not fall short of your goal."

11. Make your content excellent. "Identify a group of strong writers and content creators on your team or among your volunteer base," King advises. "A well-written story and photographs go very far; a really phenomenal video or two makes your likelihood of crowdfunding success even higher. Find a graphic designer to help you. Find a volunteer. There are amazing people who are just waiting for someone to ask them for a meaningful way to use their skills." Also critical, says King:  "Don't post mediocrity. It's better to delay publication of a crowdfunding site or a video until it is amazing. Don't be cheap. Have a budget for producing professional content and take a percent of what you're raising to pay for it." And lastly? Offers Wolfe: "Make it less about words and more about the visuals. Let strong images make the sale."

12. Don't just think of your $25 donors as one-offs. Convert them into $200 donors by getting them to bring their friends to the table, as additional crowdfunders around your project. And then, after the campaign is over, continue to engage them and invite them to give more of themselves, their time, or their dollars to the goals you're next trying to achieve.

13. Make it a group experience. "The biggest thing," says Wincorkowski, "is to form a great team to expose your cause and make it a community endeavor. We were all fired up having to shut down this bookstore, so we were all enthusiastic about the chance to get it going again." Word Up was able to engage the writer Junot Diaz, who helped volunteers put together a video about the bookstore. "That helped us to turn the tide," Wincorkowski said. But don't forget to also go offline with your appeals. "We did a lot of our community building in person, as well. We showed our faces and we ended up raising a lot of money offline, as well, convincing supporters to give a portion of their services to this campaign. We made it clear from the start that this wasn't about us but about all of us."

14. Make it a shareable story.  Says Pereira: "Take off your fundraiser hat. Don't run a crowdfunding campaign as a fundraiser but as a creative team that is engaging personally with people around the passion you share for the cause. If you're having fun and pushing a positive message, it comes across as a positive attitude that is powerful. Such attitudes are infectious, and sharing is all about inspiring others to say, 'Hey, I saw this great video, check it out.'" Attitude also can be contagious.

15. Make sure the message of your campaign is crystal-clear. "On most crowdfunding platforms, there are at least 10,000 donors, but if your message isn't clear, they will move on—especially when the next campaign is just one click away," Wolfe says. "Nobody wants to read a long document to learn what it is you're up to, so be clear.  Make it short, like '$25 feeds 30 hungry New Yorkers.' And keep it focused on getting someone to buy something.  No matter how great your message is, if you don't have it matched to a good, short story with a clear message, it's not going to go anywhere."

16. Don't work with inexperienced fundraisers. Says Wincorkowski: "You need people who are aware of what it takes to inspire people to give and to keep track of those efforts."

17. Don't set up a conflict with other initiatives, says Livingston. Don't steal the buzz from another project or dilute the amount of staffing you have to support the projects already under way.

18. Don't assume people know you do amazing work. Prove it to them with links, says King.

19. Choose the right platform for your effort, not the most popular one, says Livingston. Make sure—before you start your campaign—that you know exactly what the fee structure is all about and what is required of them and of you.

20. Link to previous success stories. "Show them that you've done this before and that it is within your capacity and networks to achieve impact," says King.

Got any lessons to add? Share them with us!

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: istock.com)

Philanthropy 3.0

Once again this year, I'm curating a Speaker Series for NYU on disruptive innovation in the advocacy sector. Called Philanthropy 3.0, the series, which I founded in 2010, is aligned with the graduate class on social media strategy that I teach with Howard Greenstein and Tom Watson for the Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising. It's all about the influence of emerging/social media on advocacy for social good.

This year's segments focus on Crowdfunding, women-led digital activism, Cause Video and big data partnerships between nonprofits and the nation's new crop of data hackers/analysts for good. All panels will be held from 6-8p at the NYU Welcome Center Auditorium at 50 West 4th Street, on the NYU campus just east of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.

Wednesday, February 20th — a Social Media Week panel on crowdfunding for causes. Among the panelists are Shaun King, founder and CEO of Hope Mob. King, 28, is the pastor of Courageous Church in Atlanta. he founded Hope Mob in 2012 as a social media platform that asks strangers to vote on which lives to help — "lives that would otherwise fall through the philanthropic cracks of society," King told Fast Company magazine last year. Also on that panel will be: Robert Wolfe, the co-founder of Crowdrise, a cause-focused platform he founded with actor/philanthropist Edward Norton; Stephanie Pereiera of Kickstarter; Veronica Liu of Word Up, an NYC nonprofit that used Indiegogo to raise more than $65,000 to keep the doors open at this community bookstore in Washington Heights, and Geoff Livingston, the social media strategist and author of The Fifth Estate: How to Create and Sustain a Winning Social Media Strategy. Howard Greenstein will be moderating.

Wednesday, March 6th — we'll be talking about the rise of women-led social networks in advocacy, in honor of Women's Philanthropy Month. The panel, "Women and Philanthropy: Networked Activism for a Changing Landscape," will include Jennifer James of Mom Bloggers for Social Good and Allison Fine, co-author of The Wired Nonprofit. Tom Watson will be moderating this one.

Then, on Wednesday, April 10th — same time, same place — I'll be moderating a panel on the latest trends in the use of cause video and social media in fundraising. It will feature the formerly homeless activist Mark Horvath, founder and CEO of InvisiblePeople.tv; Lee Hirsch, the filmmaker behind Bully, the acclaimed 2011 cause film on bullying, and Susan MacLaury, the chief of Shine Global and producer of Inocente, one of this year's Oscar-nominated short subject documentaries. Michael Hoffman, the CEO of See3 Communications, also will participate. See3 is a co-sponsor with YouTube, Cisco, NTEN and the Case Foundation of the national Do-Gooder Nonprofit Video Awards, and Hoffman will preview this year's finalists.

The last event in the series will be held on Wednesday, May 1st, on Big Data and "hackers for good" in the social advocacy sector. I'll be moderating a demo of a couple of nonprofit projects that are using "deep-data" analysis of government/public information and corporate data in the public sphere to more accurately pinpoint the source and nature of social problems over time — and, in the process, are reshaping these causes' missions and fundraising/action strategies.

Here's the registration link to the program; watch this space for the Series site link. Hope you can join us this year. All panels are free and open to the public.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo, above: 15-year-old Inocente, the subject of the Oscar-nominated short documentary of the same name, courtesy of Shine Global)

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)

Generation Go

This week's Social Media Week gatherings in 11 cities around the world -- from Hamburg and Hong Kong to Singapore and Sao Paulo -- are focusing on the role of Twitter, Facebook and other social networks as a catalyst for cultural, political, economic and social change. The theme is "Empowering Change through Collaboration." But the big takeaway so far? Social media innovation in 2012 won't be about Playing Nice with Others so much as creating new ways to battle the status quo.

Madison Avenue is ready and waiting. Tonight, at a special Valentine's Day panel on "connectedness" at J. Walter Thompson's Midtown headquarters, JWT's Worldwide Digital Director David Eastman shared research by his agency's trendspotters on what they're calling "Generation Go" -- an emerging cohort of cause-wired citizens who will use social media to support ever-higher levels of self-organizing across society. "We're becoming hyper-documentarians, chronicling everying -- the big, the small and everything in between -- in words, pictures, video and emoticons as it happens," says Eastman. "Generation Go is finding opportunity in economic advertisty, with many using social media as a platform for their entrepreneurial energies." [See his Top 2012 Trends in Social.] The moniker struck a chord among many #SMWNYC attendees, including Noni Cavaliere, who counted herself a member and tweeted this definition: "We go, not wait for someone to tell us to go." Fellow attendee Valerie Morini tweeted that "Generation Go is more of a mindset" favoring "entrepreneurship" and "change without invitation."

Reflecting back on a year of social media-driven uprisings in the Middle East and on Wall Street, Meetup Founder and CEO Scott Heiferman took it all a little further, saying social media have unleashed widespread energy among citizens seeking to build a new society of parallel political and economic systems. "The future is going to be defined around the idea that people are going to render the old economy somewhat pointless," Heiferman told the #SMW12 crowd. "We're at the very early stage of a true revolution, in that people are turning away from big media and big business and big finance, big pharma, big food. What we're doing on Facebook and Twitter and other social platforms is inventing new kinds of transactions. We're turning to each other now and increasingly for what we need." Heiferman cited the emerging group of networked services like airbnb and Parker from Streetline. "Thanks to social media," he said, "people in social networks are starting to sell or rent or buy from each other. They're renting their excess parking spaces to each other and insuring each other. That might not sound like a lot, but it is no small thing when people have in these tools the power to start creating an economy outside the prevailing system."

Heiferman called this new economy a "do-it-ourselves" economy -- "something between our everyday social interactions on Facebook and our activism in movements like Occupy" that is enabling people to "turn to each other to get what they need" outside the traditional system.

Andrew Rasiej, the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, followed Heiferman, saying the market trends are reflective of broader changes across society. "...We live in an era of a new currency" of friends and family and relationships we can trust, he said tonight. Government, for example, "will not get fixed. It is going to get redesigned and rebuilt" by wired citizens demanding faster, more responsive and transparent institutions and social systems.

"...We should not wait to fix the 20th century political system or wait for the 21st century democracy to get built," Rasiej said. "The 21st century democracy and economy will be built by us, by activists, by engineers who understand that the power of technology is not based in the hallways of Congress but in the streets all over the world."

For more on this week's Social Media Week panels, see the schedule and collection of livestreams.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph of torn poster of deposed Tunisian President Ben Ali by Murat Sarica-2011)

Pinterest

Okay, so everyone is talking about Pinterest. Or sending you invitations to check out the crazy virtual pinboards there. And so now you're thinking, 'Is this really another social network I need to know about?'

Here's the thing: Pinterest is one of the Web's fastest-growing social networks. Though it's been around for two years, it has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity over the past couple of months. Pinterest now ranks among the Web's Top 10 social networks, among the likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr. But the biggest take-away about Pinterest? It is becoming one of the highest referral traffic sources out there. Shareaholic's February report on referral traffic from social networks says Pinterest can drive more people to your Website than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube. Combined. And now it's starting to gain on Twitter.

So what's the appeal? Pinterest lets you organize and share images and videos you discover on the Web about pretty much anything -- whether a collection of favorite typefaces or our friend Lina Srivastava's collection of images that each represent a different multimedia campaign for social good. Her pinboard is called "narrative design for social action." [My pinboard, on the other hand, is a starter's collection of just a few of my favorite cause videos, here. I have another pinboard, a collection of info-graphics used in advocacy. Social Media consultant and blogger Beth Kanter, has 20 Pinterest boards that mix her personal interests with her work on social media.

Just like other social networks, Pinterest lets you build a list of people and organizations to follow. A number of nonprofit organizations already have a presence on Pinterest -- either on pinboards which they have created themselves (the Humane Society of New York) or on pinboards their fans have created in appreciation, such as this one made about the American Red Cross. Another page for good, Help Japan, had (at this posting) 421,600 followers. [For a wide array of other boards on other subjects, see Mashable's recent post, 21 Must-Follow Pinterest Users. And see this infographic suggesting Pinterest may be "the next social commerce game-changer."]

A few other things to know about Pinterest: It's not just about checking out somebody's collection of wedding gown images or their most favorite album covers from the '60s. Pinterest can be a promotional engine for brands and a way to help drum up support for an activist cause or action. It also is a form of content marketing. If you run a bakery, say, you might want to think about sharing some special cookie recipes for your Pinterest followers. Or if you're a photographer, it's a great place to show off your latest work. Pinterest also is a good way to build authority around a topic. Select a couple of topics related to your industry and create boards to share unique related content about them. Or take it to the next level. If you're showcasing products on specific boards, try running exclusive content and promotions for Pinners, or use it to complement existing campaigns.

It's not yet clear how Pinterest enthusiasts will develop the network over time. [Many social network platforms begin with one purpose in mind and then get reinvented by users to meet a wider need. This past week's controversy over the Susan G. Komen Foundation's decision (later reversed) to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, for example, spawned another use of Pinterest, which Kanter labeled "pinactivism."] But one thing about Pinterest is already fairly obvious. It can help raise awareness for a cause and a brand and build followers. And if Help Japan proves able to raise money on Pinterest, many more nonprofits will be sure to get pinned.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Wirearchy

Today is the official one-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and supporters are congratulating themselves, with birthday cakes and marathon choruses of "Happy Occupy to You" from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park. But the movement's staying power should come as no surprise. What has been unexpected? Since the Tweet that started it all went viral July 15 -- "Sept. 17. Wall St. Bring Tent." -- the movement it catalyzed has appeared to kindle more heat globally than nationally. The New York Times journalist Nick Kristof, in a column Sunday titled America's Primal Scream, wrote how "it's fascinating that many Americans intuitively understood the outrage and frustration that drove Egyptians to protest at Tahrir Square, but don't seem to comprehend similar resentments that drive disgruntled fellow citizens to 'occupy' Wall Street."

Indeed, the #OWS movement had its largest single day of protests Saturday not in New York but far from Wall Street. Writes blogger Nate Silver: "In Europe, crowds in cities like Rome, Barcelona, and Madrid were estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 per city -- more, probably, than the protests in the U.S. combined." [See Cause Global's coverage of the rally in Times Square here.] Silver, who analyzed crowd turnout numbers and the distribution of the October 15th protests worldwide, also found that "despite Occupy Wall Street's name, its energy in the U.S. seems to be coming from the left coast" -- and apparently from people who didn't vote in the 2010 mid-term elections.

But it would be foolish to underestimate the movement's ideological diversity, its staying power, or its organizational savvy. This is not, as protester Justin Strekal told The Associated Press over the weekend, simply "a participatory democracy in a little park" near Wall Street. On the contrary, Occupy Wall Street has become a global franchise, backed by an impressively horizontal "wire-archy" of digitally connected strategy, media, and community organizing professionals, volunteers, sympathetic tech startups and consultants, online petition groups and other pro bono-minded social enterprises and innovators -- all of whom say they are working to redefine for the digital age what is meant by economic sustainability and participatory leadership (not to mention strategic planning).

For its part, the Zuccotti Park "branch" of the movement is continuing to meet daily in a general assembly and has aggregated nearly $300,000 of hundreds of individual donations into an Amalgamated Bank account. It has a local finance committee -- which, according to The New York Observer, just voted to turn down a donation from music mogul Russell Simmons because he wanted to help the group shape specific demands. (Victoria Sobel, 21, Occupy Wall Street's CFO, told The Observer Sunday that organizers are almost "obsessively sensitive" to any one individual or organization trying to exert leadership over Occupy; she said finance committee members are taking crash courses in money management to make sure the movement's books remain transparent and unfettered by New Age lobbyists.)

The Zuccotti Park installation also has its own newspaper, published in two languages, and a library, an infirmary, a rotating set of showers and rooms-for-no-rent in the area, and a waste disposal system set up by a social enterprise called Mobile Design Lab. And more widely, it has media savvy by the boatload, thanks to a real-time line-up of global PR volunteers and liasons who have, so far, managed the message cross-culture. People in London, Madrid, South Korea, Japan, Sydney and Stockholm, for example, were carrying similar signs and wearing similar t-shirts on October 15, all claiming membership in the "99 Per Cent." Meanwhile, multiple networks of crowdsourced "hackathon" techies are working to better connect sympathizers near and far, and more than 100 lawyers are donating their services to aid the arrested. Most protesters and their supporters, of course, don't live outside in parks, but rather in houses and apartments in multiple cities and countries. [Like the Arab Spring protests, this movement depends on people aggregating both geographically and online to continuously catalyze multiple communities while also populating a geographical "center" for public reference.]

And politically, at least for now, Occupy Wall Street is trending in the mainstream, if not on Twitter, among some of the movement's most unlikely supporters. The GOP-appointed Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told a recent hearing of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that "at some level, I can't blame them (the protesters)" for "blaming, with some justification, the financial sector for getting us into this mess."

In the words of New Yorker Senior Editor Amy Davidson, "this is a global conversation going on now, and it would be foolish not to listen. ...Wall Street has long been a multinational brand name; now Occupy is, too. ...For an anti-corporate movement, OWS has a good sense of franchising -- and more importantly, it has something to say about enfranchisement."

No doubt. Occupy, perhaps most significantly, offers yet another example of how the Internet is profoundly enabling people to reshape the status quo at multiple levels of society. Occupy's loose-knit, distributed networks of hyper-agile, group-led "adhocracies" are -- thanks to our growing addiction to social media -- both inevitable and impossible to ignore. Can such digital organizations and movements topple governments as we know them? If you count the Arab Spring demonstrations, they already have. What's not so obvious is what comes next.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo of Occupy demonstrator by Reuters, with permission. Illustration: Cover of the October 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker]

Al-Jazeera's Wadah Khanfar

Al-Jazeera Chief Wadah Khanfar addressed this year's TED conference about the civic uprisings sweeping the Arab world and gave his take on where the unrest might be leading. He said he believes that social media are helping to make the Middle East and northern Africa more democratic.

"The future we were dreaming for has arrived," Khanfar told conferees (see the video of Khanfar's talk, below, made public yesterday). "A new generation, well-connected and inspired by universal values and global understanding, has created a new reality for us. We've found a new way for us to express our feelings and dreams. ...The regimes who invested billions of dollars in security systems collapsed and disappeared because of the voices of the people. They (the regime) tried to kill (the people), but the young people found something called Facebook and Twitter...and we found that all of these people in the streets are our reporters now."

Here's Khanfar:

(Photo of Khanfar, top, courtesy TED Conferences)

Twitter Contagion

(Click on the image for a full-sized view)

"Egypt is the crystal ball in which the Arab world sees its future," writes Kovas Boguta, creator of this data visualization (above), which analyzes the Twitter communication that erupted during the recent youth uprising in Egypt .

Boguta, founder and CTO of Infoharmoni -- which analyzes real-time social structures on the Web -- says he arranged the map to place individual Twitter users close to the people with whom they communicate. The red and blue dots represent which language users were using to communicate (Arabic is denoted in red, while English is denoted in blue). The size of the dots represents the individual's influence on the group as a whole. Different factions are placed near the factions they influence, revealing how weak ties get stronger.

Boguta offered this explanation February 11th on his blog, Computational History:

“Many fascinating structures can be seen. Wael Ghonim, a pivotal figure in this self-organizing system who instigated the initial protests on January 25th, is prominently located near the bottom of the network, straddling two factions as well as two languages. The size of his node reflects his influence on the entire network.

The lump on the left is dominated by journalists, NGO and foreign policy types; it seems nearly grafted on, and goes through an intermediary buffer layer before making contact with the true Egyptian activists on the ground. However, this process of translation and aggregation is key; it is how those in Egypt are finally getting a voice in Western society, and an insurance policy against regime violence. Many of the prominent nodes in this network were at some point arrested, but their deep connectivity help ensure they were not ‘disappeared’.”

"Most of those in this network speak both English and Arabic, and their choice of language says a lot about both the movement and about Twitter. Some may choose to primarily communicate with friends, while others make an effort to be visible to the rest of the world on purpose. They want to reach out, and connect with, the rest of global society."

Boguta told TechCrunch at the launch of Infoharmoni in 2009:

People are social animals, and love to both move in packs and purposefully individuate. ... Existing social groups incubate new topics of interest on Twitter, and existing interests incubate new social groups. Both move in response to each other. Twitter bills itself as the pulse of the planet, but it's more like the pulse of creative networks.

PopTech2010: Machine Politics

Thanks to the convergence of crowdsourcing, social media and social networks, the world is becoming a more responsive place. While we're still experiencing the adolescence of social media, the information systems we're building are starting to get better at taking input from crowds of people and using it to help us mine the data glut for what we, as indviduals, are most likely to want or to need.

Case in point: Google's new Instinct program -- a behavioral prediction feature that is taking the billions of queries we've all typed into its system and is using them to paint a statistical picture of what is our most likely path through this new information landscape. "I can now program my inbox with Instinct or take Pandora's Thumbs feature and tell it I dislike a song and it can respond by giving me a better one," MIT Media Lab's Riley Crane told PopTech2010 conferees today during a segment on social media.

The great irony, of course, is that despite these systems' abilities to be more responsive, none of them can yet solve big social problems that require large-scale collaboration or coordination over time.

But we're getting closer, says Crane. Thanks, in part, to social networks like Twitter and Facebook, we now have -- for the first time -- the ability to have and maintain, simultaneously, weak social ties of former coworkers and classmates and other acquaintances. "For years, we've had ways of communicating with strong and weak ties but what we've really seen with Twitter and Facebook is that we have new ways to keep up with our weak ties and this solves a really hard communication problem," Crane says. This new class of weak ties, he says, will become increasingly important as we step up our efforts to organize ourselves around shared context. These weak ties, he argues, form a new social class. Can it be mobilized, locally or nationally or internationally, for social good? To achive political goals? Some argue that in the political arena, the Tea Party movement is an example of weak-tie networks that have been brought together around common goals. [For more on the strength of weak ties, see both Malcolm Gladwell's October 4, 2010 piece in The New Yorker, "Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted" and Jonah Lehrer's rebuttal, "Weak Ties, Twitter and Revolution," in Wired. Also see Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone's rebuttal in The Atlantic.]

Not convinced? We're already seeing what's possible, though mostly anecdotally. Patrick Meier, the director of crisis mapping for Ushahidi, told PopTech conferees Friday about an urgent request that had come into Ushahidi from Haiti shortly after the January earthquake. Rescue workers on the ground were scrambling for the GPS coordinates for seven locations in Port au Prince where survivors were known to be trapped beneath fallen buildings. More than 1,000 miles away, in snowy Cambridge, Mass., Meier and one of his grad students got busy and soon were able to find six of the seven coordinates, using Google maps and social networks. But the seventh location remained elusive -- until the grad student tweeted for help. "She sent out her query to her followers and got an answer that the building she was looking for might be owned by the Holiday Inn chain," Crane said Saturday, retelling Meier's story. "She used that data to look for a building with a pool, and using satellite images, she found it. But she still needed to locate the building nearby.

"Then something incredible happened," Crane said. Someone in Brooklyn tweeted that he knew someone who used to work in that hotel and knew the area. Soon, that person was walking Meier and his student through a satellite image of the neighboring streets to help rescuers get the proper coordinates. Said Crane: "Think back 5 years. You wouldn't have been able to do anything like this. We're getting closer to figuring out what it means to start forming spontaneous communicaton networks that act like central nervous systems."

But activists, beware. Thanks to an ever-growing glut of data, we are at once racing to tune out irrelevance and stoke innovation. "If we're not careful in our race for perfect algorithmic relevance," says Moveon.org founder and online organizer Eli Pariser, "we may find ourselves at a loss of brilliant breakthroughs." Pariser told PopTech conferees Saturday that unless we can integrate some form of "curation ethics" into the ways our machines slice and dice the info glut for us, we risk missing need-to-know information that our algorithms may now deem irrelevant. "...This time in the evolution of information systems is really a great time for organizing information but ... innovation requires serendipity. ... An algorithmically curated environment lacks the blind variation needed for creativity. We need media systems that call our attention to what we don't know. If you have perfectly constructed environments, you're going to miss out."

Pariser urged conferees to be vigiliant against over-censorship and hyper-stereotyping by data-vetting machines. "What's creative is something new and useful that you can't come up with through an algorithm or equasion," Pariser said. "We also need to be open to people and systems that can disprove data -- not just to systems that find similarities."

PopTech2010 concludes today. Watch this space for further coverage.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Magdalena Tworkowska for istock.com)

Hollywood Social

Sony today released the first full trailer for The Social Network, the much-anticipated movie about the creation of Facebook. Directed by David Fincher (Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Sports Night), the film tells the story of how Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg helped to dream up the iconic social network at Harvard University way back in 2003. The tale includes the perspectives of other young entrepreneurs at the time who sued Zuckerberg, saying the site was their idea. [Hint: the tagline reads, "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies."]

The film, based on Ben Mezrich's 2009 book, Accidental Billionaires, will debut at the New York Film Festival on September 24, before the movie is released on October 1.

It was the second time in as many weeks that social media have been the subject of Hollywood buzz. Last week, producers/directors Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald announced they will make Life in a Day, a nonfiction movie knitted together with crowdsourced YouTube video clips.

What's next? Foursquare, the film?