Social Media & Politics: When Will It Be Taken Seriously?

Why doesn’t government and politicians take activism on Social Media services seriously? To some degree they do. For elected members activity on blogs, comments on news sites, some Twitter commentary; can be an indicator of citizen sentiment on an issue. But what about petitions and gaining change within government?

My theory is that there’s a few issues at work here, legitimate ones for government. Issues that will need addressing in the future.

Content Quality: Let’s face it, often times the “comments” left in online news services and blogs are often crap. They are highly opinionated and often without the evidence needed to make the opinion based on some qualified research or data. Often they are rants and by people who likely can’t be persuaded to an alternate stance anyway; politicians and government understand this. It’s not worth the effort to address them.

Anonymity & Identification: This to me is a serious element. Most people post on blog comments or news media site comments under an assumed false name or “handle” like “opinionator123″ and don’t use a real name. One has no idea if that person is a smart 12 year old or a 40 year old, male or female or living within the jurisdiction of the story being addressed. This then goes to the issue of identification and validating the responses or discussion.

What Will Be Needed?

Today, there doesn’t exist a way to truly validate an individual (beyond online voting systems, which are not scaled to go beyond electoral requirements and time lines.) Outside of Cyburbia, we have established means of determining personal identity (drivers license, identity cards, passports etc.) which we do not have in Cyburbia. Hand written signatures on a petition are acceptable because there’s a proven means of validation, trusted and accepted. But there isn’t for our lives in Cyburbia.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

For now, I think that just leaves politicians and government bureaucrats with taking Social Media seriously – but only so far. More in terms of “general sentiment” or identification of potential issues to cross over into voter or constituent actions. But that’s it. Government has a responsibility to the public to make decisions based on quantifiable sources and via accepted means.

So until some form of personal validation system is developed and validated by governments, we can’t expect activism in Social Media services and channels to be taken overly seriously. Services like Move On are gaining momentum, but still remain on the fringes of acceptance. In India such activism is taking hold, but only hits the “elites” or those that can afford computers and Web access; still missing the majority of the population.

What do you think?

(Author: G. Crouch)

Social Media Tools of the Future

Just for fun, I was pondering what types of Social Media services there might be 5-10 years. So here’s some and maybe you’ve got one or two to add?

Privacy Chip: This will be a “chip” or chunk of software that automatically defines your privacy settings with any new Social Media service you sign up for, like the Disqus system for comment moderation on blogs. You pre-program your settings and it ensures only certain information is public.

Social Chip: Embedded data on your Social Networks and services, with privacy info defined by type of service (kind of like the Poken now, but embedded into your mobile and credit/debit cards with permission marketing levels.)

The Permission Card: Maybe it’s same size as a credit card, or maybe it’s loaded into your mobile device – essentially, it details what marketers can and can’t do with your contact info. You set the preferences on how marketers communicate with you, if they behave you can “rate” their behaviour.

The Anonomator: A little piece of bot software you control. It can go out and destroy any content across the web or a connected device that is negative about you. It coincides with your Privacy Chip for validation and Social Media services must comply….so when you discover those pics of you drunk at the party…

The One Device: It’s your mobile phone, includes your social chip and privacy chip data and can allow you to connect to publicly available terminals anywhere and has all your data there – text, audio, video, pics. It has your credit and debit card data, even your ability to vote in elections…everything digital.

Insta-Rater: Having lunch at a decent place and want to rate it? Aim your One Device at the code on the wall, rate it by stars, add a text note if you like…voila! all done, no registration process, your device handles all the validation, and it works with AR (Augmented Reality) services as well.

Have any ideas for the future of social technologies

(Author: G. Crouch)

Social Media Channel Decline by Users

We’re always doing research into how people are using Social Media, much of it for clients, much of it the result of the research we do for clients. One interesting trend we’ve noted over the past few months – people are turning off the garden hose. We’re learning to filter.

As humanity, we’ve suffered from “filter failure” ever since more books were printed than a human could read in their lifetime. All we’ve done is increase the volume, now more significantly.

When we do research for a client, we always look for the “power user” those engaged more than others. We also look at the Echo Ratio (our own stat based on the Solidarity Value of economics) and applying the Power Law Curve. I’m just stating our process here.

Up until 3 months ago, the average joe user of Social Media (i.e. engaged 5-10 hours per week in social media channels) had 5.4 channels they engaged in (that most often comprised in Canada, UK and USA of a social network, microblog, email, blog and one or two others.)

Over the past 3 months we’ve seen that decline quite significantly, down to an average of 3.25 apps per average user of social media channels.

Are we learning to apply filters? We’re now looking at heavier users. I like the posting recently from David Armano on a similar vein.

What do you think?

Social Media and Banks: An Emotional Place

We’ve done a fair amount of research into the financial sector in the past year, both Canada and the United States. Most of our data is of course, confidential to the client. But we can speak in “aggregate” terms of our findings. The broad strokes so to speak.

To put it bluntly, there is a lot of anger, frustration and distrust out there. No surprise given the tail end of 2008 and the subsequent spiral into a financial quagmire. Canada may have gotten off a little better, but it still saw a wallop at the banks in terms of consumer mistrust.

There’s lots of chatter going on, as might be expected. We found women tend to discuss bank services more than men (62% female overall) and that the most popular age group for discussion was 30-45. We looked at commentary in online newspapers, newsgroups and forums, blogs, microblogs and some social networking sites. Over 1.7M “conversations” in total across Canada and the U.S.

The topics that ranked the highest for consumer negativity towards the financial sector;

1. Mortgages

2. Fees and service charges

3. customer service

As might be expected, the larger the bank, the more negativity. Smaller, more localized banks in the U.S. had higher consumer sentiment while in Canada it was credit unions that saw the most positive sentiment. People are frustrated. Banks that used “trust” statements in their slogans were hit the worst with re-purposed content turning those slogans back on themselves.

So what does this all mean? As an industry sector, the financial world of businesses has a lot more trust building to do with consumers. It’s no small surprise, but banks and other financial institutions are likely addressing this issue. One wonders how consumer sentiment might be in a year or two from now. The volume of discussion is still rising across multiple social media channels as well. We expect to see a peak by May or June of this year, but that remains to be validated.

Why Email is Still the Killer App of Social Media

Because it’s boring. Email is boring.

But more people use email than Facebook or Twitter. Combined. Every day. Still.

Email spans a wider demographic range than any other social technology application. We’re already seeing (in our own research and others) that age groups are defining social technologies…more on that later.

Email is ridiculously simple and it’s boring. Across many age groups, we’ve mastered email, whether that’s via a Web interface like Gmail or Hotmail or if we have an email client like Mail or Entourage or Thunderbird. Most of us already have our various “groups” that we send stuff to. We don’t think about it, we just “forward”, “reply” or create new, copy/paste or drag/drop and hit “send.” And we’re done. Boring. That’s when social change comes about from a technology; when it becomes boring.

Jody Williams won a nobel peace prize for land mine activism – mostly using email and faxes. Two boring technologies.

The phone eventually enabled the ability to have 911 service, of which a TV show was created. Because it was boring and we all knew how to dial a phone. In the 1930′s phones were pretty much banned in offices.

Facebook is not an email “killer” because it’s still complicated and not boring yet. Same thing with Twitter.

A new social media technology that is now pretty much boring is SMS/txt messaging and perhaps the first instance of txt messaging benefiting society was Haiti – that most of the money raised in the US, Canada and UK was through SMS donations. In the 2005 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, it was txt messaging that played the key role in gathering people to protest the election results and promoted democracy. It’s getting boring.

So, what do you think? Is email still the number one social technology?