Humor Bites

Here's the trailer for Michael Moore's upcoming film, on class warfare in America. Called Capitalism: A Love Story, the film is scheduled to open October 2—just in time for the holidays.

Say what you will about Moore: he wields humor like a blowtorch, forcing us to look hard at ourselves. [Note to cause filmmakers: Lighten up?] Who knew the recession could be so entertaining?

Tweets + 12s = video twitter?

If tweets were short video clips instead of words, they'd probably be something out of 12seconds.tv —a Twitter-like video-messaging startup based in Santa Cruz, Calif., that's already starting to bend the rules of both social advocacy and marketing. Tweets are 140 characters long; a 12seconds.tv video lasts no more than 12 seconds—a kind of talking, moving, real-time snapshot that can capture anything from an opinion to a baby's first steps to a feeling or a news flash. “It’s a different way to engage with someone on the Web,” says cofounder Sol Lipman.

Unlike most of the fare on YouTube, 12seconds’ videos—known as "12s"—are uber-short and often emotionally evocative glimpses of “right-now” moments, more like a memorable photograph and a feeling than a story. [See the 12-second Me Plus Italy, above]. Also different about 12s, says Lipman, is that they're made mostly for consumption—for the people who would watch them. To be sure, video-messaging represents a new step in the evolution of social media that offers fresh opportunities for creative expression, event coverage, and persuasion.

Big advertisers and new-wave nonprofits are sitting up and taking notice, especially now that the new iPhone3GS is fueling a bump-up in 12seconds' traffic. A variety of advertising and marketing agencies have approached Lipman and his colleagues, looking to sign up 12seconds to co-create user-generated content for brands ranging from M&Ms to LG Electronics to Adidas.

Consider the startup’s recent “12omercials” [tweet-able commercials] for Adidas, called the 12th Man Campaign. The initiative asked 12seconds.tv members [known as 12ers] to create their own 12-second shorts to broadcast their enthusiasm for England’s Chelsea Football Club during the run-up to tomorrow’s friendly soccer match against the Seattle Sounders. Participating 12ers made videos in May and June to earn a 12th man spot on the Chelsea bench. Adidas has been running some of the better 12s on the JumboTron in Seattle’s Safeco Field. But only this clip won the contest, which ended last week. (Here’s another that made the finals.)

12seconds is trying the same formula to help boost the visibility of some nonprofits, including the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Summer of Social Good, and Earth Hour. The Summer of Social Good campaign, for example—organized by Mashable—asked 12seconds to invite its community to film people (and themselves) saying what they would do or give up to benefit the good of society. Here’s one of the three, 12-second spots that won a free Kodak Zi6 pocket video camera for its producer. “I don’t think we’ve been able to raise tons of money directly for nonprofits yet,” says Lipman, “but I think 12seconds is a great tool for spreading the word, creating a video brand, and then giving people a bunch of great content to utilize.”

Lipman says about 60 percent of the videos appearing on 12seconds.tv are produced on Web cams, 30 percent on mobile phones, and about 10 percent in video uploads. But that’s soon to change: With the iPhone3GS, Lipman says there’s been a surge in the number of mobile spots across the site. "Mobile, in general, is just beginning to become this huge opportunity to bring us all closer together,” Lipman says.

What do you think?

—Marcia Stepanek

(Top video: Me Plus Italy, courtesy Italyworkshop on 12seconds.tv)
(NOTE: This post first appeared on PopTech.com and is being re-posted here with permission)

Swarms

Manhattan's birds are brilliant. From my 42nd-floor conference room in Midtown, I often see flocks fly by in perfect formation, suddenly veering right, then left, to dodge the buildings below. It's as if they're being choreographed by some grand master hawk squawking orders from atop the Empire State Building.

Truth is, of course, birds aren't very smart. [Central Park's birds still can't seem to distinguish a cookie wrapper from a bagel chip.] But flocks of them? Different story. Group-think helps them to negotiate skyscrapers and migrate to Miami in a heartbeat.

Humans, too, gain some advantages in groups: we're just starting to figure out how much smarter we can be when linked online. [Five years ago, we began using social media to find and aggregate the people we knew into simple social networks. Then we started organizing our networks to do things, like raise money for a cause.] Now? We're experiencing another big evolutionary shift in the way we use the Net to collaborate. Think swarms—multiple social networks that aggregate rapidly to influence the offline behavior of others. They're much bigger and more powerful than our single social networks ever were. And like SWAT teams, they're all about swooping in to do something quickly, then disbanding.

Four types of super-swarms made headlines last week, offering up some tough lessons in mass collaboration for organizers and bystanders, alike:

* Twestival—the 250-city, one-day global gathering of Twitter users offline—ended up catalyzing hundreds of thousands of people in 186 cities worldwide to raise money for charity:water.org, a New York-based nonprofit that builds freshwater wells in Africa. It was the largest, if not the first, swarm-for-good ever assembled. Yet today, nearly a full week after the Feb. 12 event, Twestival organizers still don't know how much money they raised toward their goal of $1 million. Amanda Rose, Twestival's London-based chief organizer, sent out a tweet early yesterday that attempted to lower expectations: "Reaching $1 million that quick was always going to be tough," she tweeted, "but the awareness that came out was worth it. Will not blame those who didn't reach it." [This followed an earlier tweet that indicated that only 25% of the cities participating had reported how much money they raised. Later still, she tweeted: "We are close to £200k ($284,703.210) so nothing small. Announce soon."] Throughout the day, Rose urged people to continue donating in a last-ditch effort to bring the tally closer to the goal. Take-away: Swarms can easily overwhelm the individuals who organize them; their behavior is very difficult, if not impossible, to document in detail or control by any one individual or nonprofit once catalyzed.

* More than 4,000 people swarmed into London's Liverpool Street Station Feb. 9 to both mock and mimic an ad by a local phone company. Some characterized this Facebook-driven swarm—which totaled 14,000 participants online and off—as, simply, the latest in a series of Internet-inspired pranks in recent years [The first recorded flash mob occurred in Manhattan in 2003.] But this one was different. It might be the first swarm mobilized to mock or mimic something commercial. Previous "flash mobs", new media experts say, have been focused simply on having fun. This swarm resulted from viral marketing writ huge. Take-away: Companies can help to launch a swarm as part of a viral marketing campaign but can't guarantee it will stay "on message."

* The Women's Media Center mobilized a swarm in New York and Washington on Feb. 10 to protest remarks made by TV personality Bill O'Reilly following President Obama's first press conference. O'Reilly derided veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, calling the 88-year-old journalist "the wicked witch of the East" and poking fun at her age. Within hours, more than 10,000 people sent angry emails to O'Reilly and his producers, forcing the conservative provocateur to apologize to Thomas on air the next day—precisely what the swarm ordered. Take-away: Swarm-advocacy can be used to both challenge and promote free speech and social norms in new and highly powerful ways, raising new questions about the power of a networked crowd to shape the expression—and the behavior—of an individual.

* al Qaeda forces Feb. 11 staged simultaneous suicide attacks on three Afghan government ministries by mobilizing newly formed online strike-swarms. Terrorist "flash mobs" are now being used in smaller-scale terrorist violence, similar to the kind first seen in Mumbai last November, swarm theorist John Arquilla says in a piece he wrote Feb. 17 for The International Herald Tribune. Arquilla says al Qaeda and its affiliates have been using swarm tactics for several years and that they are being coordinated, increasingly, through the use of social media. Take-away: Flash causes, or swarms—when politicized—can be dangerous and difficult to minimize or pre-empt.

Howard Rheingold, the author of the 2003 bestseller, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, says digital swarms are just getting started. Given the evolving "brush fire" mentality of the Web, expect to see many more of them taking collective action offline—for better or worse—in coming months. Warns Rheingold: “As these [flash groups] become politicized, there is a potential for good and for danger.”

For more on the early work of swarms, see Cisco engineer J.D. Stanley’s recent paper, Digital Swarms, here. Also check out Swarm Theory, an article by Peter Miller in the July 2007 National Geographic. And for the upside of swarms, check out Charles Leadbeater's 2008 book, We Think, about mass collaboration and innovation.

(Illustration, The Birds, by Harley McCabe for istock.com)

It's the Network, Stupid

Check out this panel discussion from today's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco about the role of social media in Barack Obama's election win on Tuesday.

New York Magazine writer John Heilemann moderated Huffington Post Founder Arianna Huffington, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and political strategist Joe Trippi, who concluded that Obama's victories in the Democratic primaries and the presidential election would not have been possible without Internet-empowered fundraising and social networking. "Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president," Huffington said. "Were it not for the Internet, he would not have been the Democratic nominee." By contrast, she said, "...the McCain campaign didn't have a clue [about Web 2.0]. ...The Internet has killed Karl Rove politics."

Here's the bulk of that panel discussion:

The Secret Sauce

(PHOTO: Gray's Papaya hot dog stand, 72nd & Broadway, Manhattan, 11-5-08)

Both Barack Obama and John McCain used the Internet to reach voters this election but Obama mastered the medium early "and exploited it to the hilt," says Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and co-founder of techPresident.com. There's no question: Election 2008 will go down in the books as the first nationwide political contest for social capital.

In an interview today with Cause Global, Rasiej credits Team Obama's "culture of belief in the Internet" for building a movement for change among ordinary citizens energized via social media into a community of engaged, viral marketers for Obama's campaign. The Web strategy, says Rasiej, was critical in helping the Illinois senator win the White House.

(Indeed, an analysis of the vote today by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press says that without a doubt, "the overwhelming backing of younger voters was a critical factor in Obama's victory." Obama drew two-thirds—or 66%—of the vote among those younger than age 30, Pew reports. In addition, Trendrr, an online statistics mashup tool, shows Obama had a clear lead in using social media to connect to his audience, as well as an overall lead in winning the attention of the blogosphere as a whole. On social networks, Trendrr says, Obama held a big lead over McCain, with 844,927 MySpace friends compared with McCain's 219,404. Between November 3 and 4 (election day) alone, Obama gained more than 10,000 new friends, while McCain only gained about 964. On Twitter, says ReadWriteWeb, Obama gained 2,865 new followers between November 3 and 4, for a total of 118,107, while John McCain's Twitter account only had 4,942 followers in total.)

Team Obama also saw an opportunity in exploiting the flagging credibility of mainstream media—again chiefly among younger voters. "[Obama's team] leap-frogged the mainstream media by producing content that they knew would get distributed for them [via social media] once it was uploaded," techPresident's Rasiej said. Especially in the final days before November 4, Obama's campaign sent daily emails and text-messages directly to supporters, urging them to vote with friends, participate in phone drives, and volunteer at campaign events—even offering up a contest in which last-minute donors could be selected to attend Obama's election-night party in Chicago. Says Rasiej:

Going forward, social capital will become increasingly more valuable than fund-raising dollars...The political power of the future will be a question of how robust and engaged a political entity's [social] network will be"—not just how much money a candidate has in the bank or how many friends he/she has in Congress.

A key lesson for cause activists everywhere from the election? Two quick reactions surface among nonprofit leaders this week. The first—be consistent with your message and broadcast it widely and continuously through the use of social media. Second? Create a movement around your cause, not just awareness for it. "Social media build powerful movements—but only when the cause is powerful and moving," says Melissa Berman, President and CEO of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. "Even the most powerful social media can't build a movement if people aren't poised to sign on. What's remarkable about social media is how quickly they can forge the links that create a movement—when the message is right."

Adds Rasiej: "What we really saw here [with Obama's Internet strategy] is the reaction of a new network publicsphere—or, you could argue, a whole new political media ecology, a generational shift that's empowering an entirely new human experience of participatory, civic engagement. It's taking our former notion of civic engagement and redefining it as something that should be continuously very relevant to people's lives."

For more on the lessons for nonprofits in Election 2008, check out Tom Watson's post today at onPhilanthropy.com, where he is a consultant and writer. Watson is also the author of the forthcoming CauseWired, a book about the use of social media in advocacy.

Writes Watson: "While there is a temptation among those who track causes and online fundraising to separate political organizing from philanthropy, I think that's a mistake - it's wishing for a division that the audience simply won't tolerate going forward. It's like hoping that a print classified operation will continue to grow during the age of Craigslist. Young people don't separate their causes into neat little boxes labeled politics and charity. They simply respond to what moves them, what their friends recommend, what they believe might change the world.

"...It's no accident that my nonprofit clients are asking about websites like Barack Obama's. The [old] order is rapidly fading."

(Photo by Marcia Stepanek)

Girls, Uninterrupted

If you haven't seen it yet, check out this video, below. It's called The Girl Effect, and it is a video and Web site produced by the Nike Foundation, in partnership with Peter Buffett's NoVo Foundation, to show the positive impact of educating and empowering girls. Shown at The Feast social innovation conference today in Manhattan, the video is one of the more powerful cause "message" campaigns making the rounds of social networks and video-sharing sites: