Community Mobilization

Stuff We All Get for blogging?

Part of attending a conference is the bounty of SWAG (Stuff We All Get) with our registration packets. Shirts, pens, flash-drives, coasters - thing we must have and need ... always emblazoned with corporate logos and slogans.

Swagapaloza is an invitation only event that engages influential Bloggers / Tweeters, Digggers and connects them with product marketers. The Bloggers attend an event where they sit through presentations to learn about new products and services. They are entitled to free samples from the presenting companies, and are obviously encouraged to continue to write about thier experience with the product.

I like the attept here to identify the most wel read and influential digital media producers. The concept is to see the grassroots with information about a product and generate buzz about it. What interestes me is how Swagapaloz is going to meaasure the buzz generate by the event. Moreso I am interested if they are going to attribute buzz value back to individual bloggers, or if they will simply say that the buzz created  is attributed to Swagapaloza.

Personal Strugles in Public Spaces

Using the web to chronicle personal struggles is an emerging phenomenon. In the past individuals may have kept their personal challenges private, but the web has created a sense of shared space that individuals are using to build support.

Wightviews is just one of the Facebook application that alows participants to chronichle thier daily exercise, and weight loss publicly. The idea behind sharing this information is the creation of a greater sense of accountability. When there are hundreds of friends eager to see you succeed there are hundres of people you do not want to let down. There has yet to be a clinical study on the use of social applications like this, but I would not be surprised to see positive impacts from using the application.

In other cases people use the webspace to chronicle thier own personal fight with a dissease. Sadly there are a number of cancer patients bogging thier experience live on the web. Michelle Will Beat It is a relatively new blog that is tracking the fight of a woman as she battles breast cancer. The blog will no doubt provide a chathartic outlet for the frustation and anger at Cancer.

Mobile Revenue - Red Cross Campaign

Without a doubt the current humanitarian crisis in Hatti is on a scale far beyond our imagination. The international response underway is heroic and well intentioned. With persistence and time the vital supplies will reach those in need.

The supplies headed to Haiti cost money and the Red Cross has done an exceptional job using mobile phones as a donation channel for collecting revenuer. Mobile devices, and mobile carriers, first collected substantial contributions during the south east Asian tsunami that impacted banda Ache Thailand. 

The $25MM dollars in fund raising is significant because it is all coming in through a single traceable channel. Mobile Accord, the company behind the sms campaign, and the individual carriers are bale to see who is donating what and the Red Cross should be able to collect demographic information for future analysis.

Going forward large scale events like this open up eyes to the potnetial of using mobile devices as channels. What is not happening is the use of mobile devices as marketing channels - just collection channels.

Mobile marketing is advancing, but it still has to contend with the very personal connection that people have with their cellular devices and the belief that their cellular phones are no to be used by marketers for advertising products. New smart phones with GPS make delivering 'just-in-time' cupons and marketing messages easier, but there is a risk of getting a chilly reception from the customer if it is unwanted and seen as spam.

The Communal Attributes of View Source

If you right click on a web page and scroll down in the menu bar you eventually come to an obscure function called 'view source'. If you click on it a new screen opens up and displays pages and pagees of txet that is the website code that makes the page display correctly - with all of the colors, margins, boxes and content. There is a discussion if the view source option is valuable.

For a web designer it is a road map to the webpage, enabling them to read the instructions and creative thoughts that went into the page. In addition designers can copy and reuse sections of code to recreate certain effects and attricbutes such as moving objects, page layouts, and even web functionality. Being able to investigate a page's structure promotes curriosity, learning, and personal investment in expanding the entire field.

The reason view source is a social is because so many designers and developers use it to expand thier own understanding of the web. They capture and repurpose good ideas and make theirs avaliable in an open HTM environemnt (you can not view source on a Flash site).The element of sharing certainly contributed to HTM being the dominent programming language. View source is an intrinsic component of HTML markup that should be preserved for the benefit of the web development community as a whole.

Google Delivers QR Codes to the 100,000 most Searched for Business

Google is delivering window stickers to the 100,000 most searched for business. The idea is that the businesses will place them in the window allowing passers by to use their mobile devices to quickly access that stor or restaurant's Google Places page for more information about them.

The use of Metatags to add deeper informaiton to a location is nothing new. I participated in the Yellow Arrows project a number of years ago, leaving yellow arrow stickers all around Atlanta with meta codes on them accessible via SMS textmessage. The difference here is that the yellow arrows were a single persons perspective of the location, where the Google project is the Google view of the place. There is less personal input and interest and more rote information... which could be very valuable to most.

Bringing Together User Generate Wedding Content

As with most happy social occasions weddings generate a lot of user created content in the form of personal photos from guests. There is a new site that allows the bride and groom to solicit photos from their guests, aggregate them, and publish them online.

Olapic offers a free service for up to 100 photos. Beyond that the couple pays $99 for unlimited photos and $25 a year for storage. Olapic seems to be in the printing business as well, creating prints as well as photo albums. This goes beyond asking friends to upload their images to Flickr and then use a universal tag to group images. 

I can see uses for the service beyond weddings. A special event is special event whether it is a wedding, bar mitzvah, anniversary party, or even a group vacation. The extension could be purchasing the disposable digital cameras and mailing them to Olapic so they could create your album for you from the photos taken by your friends.

Flash Mobs and Pulic Performance

One of the most novel and intriguing elements of social media is the ability to contact and connect with a disparate group of people who all have a common interest and a loosely tied social network. In Israel Nefesh B'Nefesh organized and conducted an amazing dance flash mob, attracting participants via Facebook.

The mob performs an almost 3:00 minute choreographed routine to celebrate the upcoming Hanukah holiday in the hear of the Jerusalem shopping and entertainment district known as Ben Yehudah Street. The performance is reminiscent of a 'Mob' executed by Improv Everywhere - a ad hock troupe from New York which was recently featured on NYP's This American Life.

I love the creativity and organization involved. In particular the leveraging of a social network system to bring together such a large group so quickly is what is most inspiring and impressive. I think the below video is even more entertaining since it gives so much great back story into the making of a flash mob.

Twitter Overdose

The amazement of Twitter (most recent shiny ball) is disturbing if not predictable. The rush to leverage Twitter has yielded some positive uses (Iranian Protest news) and it has also yielded some ruinous results. The below example showcases how leveraging social media like Twitter in very public spaces can go horribly wrong is not thought through well enough.

Find and Buy Local Food

Being a locavore (eating only what is grown and raised near you) is an amazing idea to not only ensure you get the freshest food, but it also supports your local economy and reduces the carbon impact from shipping food long distances. The challenge is that often times local produce is difficult to find and appears only in specialty markets or stands.

Local Dirt aims to connect local produce growers and those who want to buy the goods online. Althoug hthe system has few entires for produce sellers, and they are located mainly in the Carolinas, the concept is fundementally doun. The challenge is to get local producers to buy into the system and then only then can you begin to market to the locavore community. There is no sense in promoting an empty box. I hope my local market gets onto the system so I can see what is being grown and sold locally.

Social Collaboraton in Enterprise

I was lucky enough to be interviewed for this project a number of moths ago and am very excited to read the pre-release of the book. David Coleman did an exceptional job surveying and engaging collaborators within enterprise to see how social tools can drive collaboration.

I was very excited to hear David mention Basecamp and PB Wiki (tools I love to use) as cornerstones of his new book writing process. David's new book 42 Rules for Successful collaboration is an amalgam of input form those who use these systems and tools on a daily basis.

FinNode Studies Successful Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Strategies from Mark Addison on Vimeo.

The interview is interesting and give a lot of insight into the inital findings but also highlights some of the key challenges with enterprise level collaboration systems. Many years ago I helped ferret out an internal portal and found that AirProducts and Chemicals Co. in Allentown, PA had an exceptional tool. Collaboration tools and systems are not just about effeciency and communication, but also about getting th emost out of hiden tallents in your employees. I look forward to reading the file and think about internal social networks and relationship structures as an overlay on systems.