Looking at the Facebook strategy used by Bank Transfer Day

The American version of the Arab Spring (2011) is underway as I write in late October 2011.  The encampment near Wall Street is now in its second month and there are Occupy encampments in other cities around the world.  One of the side actions is Bank Transfer Day, which is a call for people to transfer their money out of big banks into credit unions, and to do so before November 5, 2011.  The hope is to generate awareness of the role big banks played in the financial crisis, and especially in the questionable practices they followed in mortgage foreclosures etc.  (see http://politics.7gen.com/2011/10/would-transfer-day-make-any-difference.html and http://politics.7gen.com/2011/10/is-anger-against-bank-of-america-and.html)

The Bank Transfer Day movement was built through Facebook and Twitter and a website.  Hence it is an example of Social Media being used for what might be Social Good (depending on your point of view).

Bank Transfer Day joined Facebook some time before October 9, 2011.  By October 19, 2011 the page had 19,241 people liking it, and 14,288 people talking about it.

The Wall for this page only has posts from Bank Transfer Day, meaning they are not allowing others to post on their wall.

The posts talk either about the number of people who have signed their pledge, or about media interviews with the founder of the movement.

The Facebook page has a Notes section containing 8 or so Notes describing the principles and discussion of various criticisms of the movement.  These are very useful Notes and shows that the organizer put some careful thought into the call for action.

One meme about it is neatly summed up in this tweet:  Something tangible the Occupy movement could get behind more vocally: Nov. 5 is Bank Transfer Day.  An early criticism of the Occupy movement is they lack direction and goals.  Hence, Bank Transfer Day was a concrete action that they could latch on to and run with.

The twitter account has made very few tweets and follows 0 people and has only 887 followers.  The tweets are largely the same content as the Facebook page posts - references to media interviews, and counts of the people who signed their pledge.

Some hashtags were used on twitter so that the community could take up the cause together:  #louderthanwords and #BankTransferDay

The domain banktransferday.org simply redirects to a Facebook Event page.  An event with nearly 60,000 people attending ;-), and a whole bunch of conversation.  This is where the real conversation is happening, on the event page.  Some of the responses made by Kristen Christian (organizer of Bank Transfer Day) are copied as screen captures and posted on the Bank Transfer Day wall.  For example the question "Why not endorse Occupy Wall Street?!?" elicited the answer from Kristin

Kristen Christian My heart is with every member of the 99%, but I cannot condone the reckless and illegal actions that were recently taken at the recommendation of a select few organizers in NYC. BANK TRANSFER DAY is meant as a peaceful & legal exercise of consumer rights.

A screen capture of which was then posted in the photo album and elicited another stream of comments.

 

Is "lots" of followers a good idea? Or is the idea to have valuable conversations?

We’re looking to create social good via social media networking websites. There are plenty of competing ideas on the best way to operate a social media networking account to create the most impact.

I recently got a twitter follow request from someone who’s obviously following the “gain as many twitter followers as possible” strategy. I follow a different strategy (see: On pruning twitter followers and why it matters who follows you) and inspect @Yapparently as an example.

First - How the bleep do you get followed by 34,000+ other accounts while making only 64 tweets? Did they do something surreptitious? Having thousands of followers along with thousands of tweets is rather normal, because those followers probably find the tweets valuable. But with so few tweets, how could the followers have any sense of the person running that account?

The normal twitter follower strategy is to follow a bunch of people, because some of them will follow you in return. It’s most likely the owner of this account followed that strategy.

Second - the content on the account right now isn’t the typical spammer posting links to various products. It looks like someone with a slightly eclectic set of interests. The account might be controlled by a real person.

Third - The account they followed has a specific purpose, to discuss electric vehicles. The Yapparently account is not compatible with my account. Therefore I will not follow them, but the question remains whether to block that account. Obviously I’m concerned about whether they’re a spammer, and I tend to shun twitter spammers by blocking them whenever I find one.

The question is “what will that person do with all those followers”? As it stands they don’t look like a spammer. But having garnered that many followers, will they turn into a spammer to exploit that follower base? There’s no clarity with Yapparently, they don’t look like a spammer despite the unnaturally large number of following/followers. Hence I won’t be blocking them.

Green Transportation Examiner - my main social media for social good project

For a year and a half I’ve been privileged with the role of Journalist, covering the greening of our transportation system. My main gig is on examiner.com with the title Green Transportation Examiner. Examiner.com operates a “citizen journalist” organization with 10’s of thousands of people writing on whatever special topic floats their own boat, and I am one of them. I’m currently learning how to utilize social media networks in promoting the journalist work I’m doing with examiner.com.
The opportunity offered by examiner.com is writing articles covering your topic of choice, and the more newsworthy of the articles will get syndicated out to news websites like news.google.com. Examiner’s (as we’re known) are asked to operate as a journalist and write newsworthy articles with a local focus.

Being an Examiner is great way to encourage social change. For example if one see’s a topic that’s under-served by the main-stream media, being an Examiner lets you take direct action to increase news coverage of that topic. In my case, I’m an electric vehicle owner with over 10 years of research and ownership experience. That informs my coverage of “green transportation” in a way that other journalists, who don’t have this ownership/research knowledge, simply cannot match. In theory I can do a better job of informing the public than those other journalists.

Recently examiner.com enabled things so we can use Google Analytics to study our traffic, and I’ve gotten surprised how much traffic is coming via social media networks like twitter and facebook.

Those percentages are quite different from my other websites where the measure for “referring sites” is much lower. But which sites are sending these referrals? The top two are twitter.com and facebook.com. Linkedin.com is fifth and some other sites show up further down the list. Other referrals come from discussion forums that I either participate in directly, or am friendly with. That’s pretty good, with a large percentage of referring sites due to social media connections.

More.. more… more…!! ;-)

How did this happen?

The linkedin traffic comes from links I post in related linked-in groups. The facebook traffic comes because I’ve connected the RSS feed for my articles so they auto-post onto my facebook account. The twitter traffic comes because every article gets tweeted.

In following postings I’ll be writing about experiments with the social media systems to promote these articles.

TED: Ze Frank's web playroom

The following is an excellent example of using social media networks in a way that creates positive social change and positive social connections. Ze Frank rose to Internet fame in 2001 with his viral video “How to Dance Properly,” and has been making online comedy, web toys and massively shared experiences ever since.

The video shows several projects he did using social media networks to crowdsource participation.

Some of the ideas are the connection we form between each other via social media networks. One image he showed was how many people in modern times are walking down the street paying more attention to their cell phone than the street-scape around them. While on the one hand it indicates a problem - people disconnected from the real world - he makes a great point that people can find joy in those connections.

It has a very inspirational message for those of us with the vision of using social media to create social good.

On pruning twitter followers and why it matters who follows you

I listen to a couple podcasts by Cliff Ravenscraft (Podcast Answerman and Social Media Serenity) and really value the information he gives. But something he’s said a few times recently has been bugging me but a couple brain cells just clicked and I think I get it now. One of his recommendations is to look through your followers on Twitter and remove those that you don’t like (e.g. if they’re spammers). Yes, Twitter is full of spammers but that doesn’t mean you have to play the spammer game. We are interested in using social media for creating social good, and does that have to include acting like or consorting with spammers? No.

The lesson I’m learning that the goal of social media for social good isn’t like the typical goaling of online marketing. The “social good” part means, to me, that the socializing I’m doing online is itself good quality. Rather than follow the typical practice of broadcasting a well crafted message to as many people as possible, social networking and social media is about engaging in relationships. Using these tools consciously to create social good includes ones own activity being socially good.

It is pretty obvious to not follow a spammer. The spammer is just spewing links knowing that with enough volume of spewage that a percentage of people will click on the link and do something which earns them money. It’s a numbers game, spew enough stuff out there and even if it’s half a percent clickthrough rate you can make money. Does that sound like the creation of social good? Nope. In other words, it’s obvious to not even follow the spammers.

The typical advice for working with social networking sites like twitter is to get as many followers as possible. The more followers, the more people who see your message, and the greater your impact. That sounds like the spammer model and spamming is just a few steps down the road from legitimate marketing techniques.

But there is a different way of thinking about social networking sites. As Cliff says over and over, it’s about forming relationships. Get it? Social networking means forming relationships and being social via online communication. Right?

Having observed the spammers for awhile it’s clear they aren’t interested in relationship building. They’re interested in spewing links. Try an experiment, send one of them a reply based on one of their postings. What happens? If they respond then perhaps they’re interested in relationship building. I tried this the other day, one of my recent finds who has been posting links to the kind of thing I’m interested in sent out a link on an article I was interested in. So I sent an at-reply asking for the person’s thoughts on the subject. Have yet to get a response. Hurm.

As noted above it’s obvious that it’s a mistake to follow a spammer. It just means your twitter-space will be filled by their spewage, making it harder for you to manage any relationships. I’ve found it helpful to relegate some of the twitter accounts to twitter lists, if the given account is full of interesting items but is not an account where a live human is engaging in conversation, I’ll still want access to the information they’re sending but not interested in seeing it in the main twitter timeline. Putting them in a list let’s me access them while keeping their tweet volume over on the side.

But what about ones own followers? Why does it matter who your followers are? And how does one go about removing a follower you don’t want to follow you? Those are the questions my mind has been stuck on. What does Cliff mean and is he smoking crack?

Again, if it’s good to have as many followers as you can get, then does it matter if some of your followers are spammers? Having observed Twitter for awhile one strategy the spammers use is to follow other accounts en masse knowing that a few will follow them back. But I take a look at the accounts of people who follow me and don’t automatically follow them back. I’m looking to follow people with whom I want to have conversation, and not be spewed to the limit with nonconversation.

Reflecting long and hard I’ve come to the conclusion the goal isn’t as many followers as you can get. Instead the goal is to have high quality followers with whom you’re having conversation and with whom you’re making an impact.

Why does it matter who your followers are? First, one of the habits when following someone on twitter is to look at who they follow and who their followers are. It’s likely people you share interests with will have found others who share the same interests. That goes both ways. Other people are doing the same thing so if they come to your account and start looking at your followers but find a bunch of spammers are following you what will it say about you?

Another way your followers matter connects back to the intention of having high quality conversation via social media networking connections. The spammer sitting in your follower list is not adding anything to high quality conversation. Even if you’re not seeing their spewage, because they’re following you they have a connection to you.

This is about affirming ones intention to have high quality conversation via social networking sites. It’s clear the spammers detract from high quality conversation. Hence, it’s best to shun them in every way possible.

The next question is how does one go about removing unwanted followers. The method will vary based on the capabilities of each social networking site. On twitter it appears the only two tools are to block an account or to report it for spam. The action you take of course depends on the account in question. An account that’s sending out a large volume of useful postings doesn’t deserve to be reported for spam, but you may want to block them anyway.

Taking these steps goes counter to some of the conventional wisdom of online marketing. This conventional wisdom says to get as many followers as possible. However ask your self, is it more valuable to have a million followers of whom half are robotic accounts just spewing spam, or is it more valuable to have a thousand followers who actually pay attention to your thoughts? Which set of followers will make a better “social good” impact? And, which set of followers are more likely to hug you and buy you a beer if you meet them some day?

Many people are working alone on great ideas that could improve the way we all live

For the last one and a half years I’ve been working on launching Transition Silicon Valley. It’s meant to be the Silicon Valley branch of the Transition Towns movement. The work is paying off right now in that we’re running a movie series called “Films of Vision and Hope” that’s drawn about 50-60 people per night. The overall message is there are a doom and gloom scenarios in the area of peak oil and climate change, and it’s easy to remain stuck there and not move into positive action. It’s an awareness raising exercise through which we’re hoping to find some people to join with us in building a credible movement. There are plenty of movies to show that give gloom and doom pictures but instead we’ve chosen movies with a positive vision and the theme is to stay in movement towards the positive vision rather than stick with doom and gloom.

At our event last Friday what stuck with me is the number of people who are working alone developing visions of a better way to live. But somehow those visions don’t get exposure to a broader audience and they’re affecting maybe the one person and a few close friends. I’ve certainly been in this place for years and know about the frustrations I feel.

It seems to be there are plenty of people with vision or ideas about better ways our society could be living. …BUT… There seems to be little way to implement the vision and produce positive social change.

Hence our ideas about a better way to live meet with obstructions such as

• The totality of the problem - can become frozen in “it’s too big for little me to understand or solve”
• The futility of fighting “The Man” - a.k.a. “I fought the Law and the Law won”
• Funding - In our scant free time between working full time and family or social life, how do we create enough time to make anything but minuscule impact?
• Diversity of opinions - Not only are there plenty of people with visions of a better way to live, but not all the visions are compatible with each other

I’m curious about ideas others have about this…

Social networking in the workplace

This evening I attended a panel discussion about “Social Networking” as it is used inside businesses. Obviously there is a wildfire like phenomenon where “Social Networking” and “Social Media” is growing very popular. Why should it stay out in the public only used for sharing with friends and family? It can and is being used within organizations for internal communication within the organization. Any organization is about getting people to collaborate together in delivering the organization’s purpose. It seems that “social networking” software has a core essence of enabling collaboration between people. It then follows that an organization whose purpose is creating social good would get value from social networking tools. But it’s not a simple thing to just wave a magic wand and spread social networking pixie dust over the organization and get value.

Does opening up a twitter account automatically make you popular? No. Supposedly twitter is a great place to ask questions because the audience will answer them, but every time I’ve tried asking questions there are approximately zero answers. Obviously I haven’t found the right twitter usage pattern to have an audience who wants to answer my questions. But obviously twitter has a specific kind of use it is best for. Each of the other social networking tools has their own best use.

For example a blog is a time oriented presentation of essays. It’s a diary, in other words. While it’s a great format it doesn’t work if what you want to present needs to be organized a different way. Each type of social media has its own geometry or structure, and its own best use.

One of the panel speakers talked about collaboration using geometrical terms. He said something about “circles”, that “social networking connections expand in circles of collaboration”. I assume what he meant is that organizations tend to have clusters of people who work on different aspects of the organizations purpose. People within an organization are continually relating with one another about tasks related to the organizations purpose. The traditional way those relationships are conducted is by telephone, memo, walking down the hall, report, team meetings, etc.

Social networking software exists to facilitate communication between people. The capabilities in this area are constantly growing. Each time a new social networking service launches it arrives with a new paradigm about facilitating human-human communication. Given that organizations (businesses, governments, churches, political activist groups, etc) are about humans communicating with each other to accomplish shared goals, well, I’m sure where this is going is obvious. In theory organizations could very well function more efficiently by using social networking paradigms in their internal processes.

What does this mean? Does it mean establishing a corporate version of facebook? No. Each social networking paradigm has its own best use, remember. I can’t imagine how facebook’s paradigm would be useful inside a corporation. Obviously facebook as a website is a popular place for businesses to reach out to their audience. But remember this blog post is about internal use of social networking.

An example I’ve seen is the bug tracking systems at the various software companies where I’ve worked. Bug tracking systems are generally very dull and boring places. The content is all the ways that the software does not work, and the conversation goes like “Hey! This doesn’t work”, “Can you be more specific”, “Oh, I wonder how that could have happened”, “I have a possible fix”, “No that fix won’t work, try this one instead”, “Darn that didn’t work either, how about this”, “yeah that’s it”, etc. It’s usual presentation is plain text with hardly any graphical groovyness anywhere in sight. It is obviously a place where people are collaborating with each other. At the company where I currently work the bug tracking system has user profiles, and each bug and comment comes along with a little avatar at the side. This adds an interesting extra dimension to it. Where in other bug tracking systems there’s zero personalization and personality, the avatar and user profile adds something you can’t directly put a finger on that makes it look like a real conversation among live human beings.

In other words I don’t think we are automatons, even when we don our work clothes and go to the office. We are people first and foremost even when the corporate paradigm is to leave your emotions at the door when you enter the office building. As people working in an organization we are relating with other people. We have to develop enough trust to work with each other so that the organization can achieve its greater goal.

In other words the internal systems a company uses can (and should) include features that carry along little trails of who the people are. Corporations can seem like soul-less places. It seems often that corporations make decisions that no human being would make. What came to mind is the industrial accident at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal India, but there is a huge history of corporate decisions causing untold huge amounts of human pain and suffering. These “corporate decisions” were indeed made by humans because essentially every corporate decision has one or more humans who is directly responsible for actually making that decision.

Maybe oh maybe corporations would be less soul-less if the corporate systems had social networking features. It would remind everybody in the corporation that, oh, the software they’re using to communicate back and forth … that there is a real live human being on the other end of the communication.