Government Engaging Ethnic Communities Through Social Media

Canada, like America and the UK are cultural melting pots. Personally I think that makes for a richer tapestry of interweaving cultures that defines a better democracy and a diverse environment which can only enrich ones life. For governments (local through federal) it represents a number of serious challenges from by-laws to legislation on everything from health care and education through to municipal planning and human resources policies. Increasingly, government departments at all levels are looking to increase their communications with various ethnic communities. Naturally, social media channels are becoming a part of the discussion on how to engage these communities.

The challenge for governments or IGO‘s looking to engage however, is where, how and to what extent. And once engaged, how does that conversation continue? Who is going to manage it and how will feedback be incorporated into policy making and insights that are helpful to senior staff and policy makers?

From our research work, we’ve seen the same behaviour patterns in Canada, America and the UK when it comes to ethnic communities active in social media channels. They may partake in Facebook, perhaps even creating a Facebook page for their cultural community group. Primary communications however, often take place in more “closed” social network services such as a Ning group or similar tool. To participate in those groups means the target community must let you in and be open to a government or IGO having some small part in the conversation in that group.

This means trust has to be developed before-hand and then subsequently once engaged. This is a challenge in and of itself; ensuring the community your engagement as an organization is sincere and meant to be a positive action. There will also be an awareness by the community that an outside organization is engaged. There are strategies and processes for handling this (part of our consulting) but research up front can be critical.

Finding where these groups are talking is key, then listening to their public commentary and layering that over empirical research and current understanding can ensure a safer path to engagement. A more popular approach we’ve seen work is for an organization to find a champion or two within the target community and have them bring members into an online environment run by the organization. This approach means the organization can focus the feedback and the community feels their privacy is respected.

The Chatty Caribbean, Naturally

Anyone who’s spent time in the Caribbean knows that the people of those splendid islands are friendly, generous of spirit, kind and very social. We recently worked on several research projects for consumer product companies looking to understand the online nature of people in the Caribbean as they developed marketing strategies. We were impressed with their online presence and the volume of chatter.

Perhaps it is natural that the more “social” a culture is that this nature should translate well into Cyburbia? It certainly does in the Caribbean. According to CARICOM (a great organization helping foster development in the Caribbean) there are just over 10 Million people online in the region or roughly 24% of the population. Facebook data indicates about 4 million online or 42% of the online population. Not bad.

Here’s some of our findings on social media use in the Caribbean;

Age Groups & Gender
The 20-39 range is the most active in social media channels. This is trending lower than the US, Canada and South America where we actually see the 30-49 segment more active overall. In North America professionals are also more active than in the Caribbean, although business discussions do feature prominently. It would seem to be almost equal with females edging just slightly above males, similar to other parts of the world.

Top Social Networks in the Caribbean
Facebook doesn’t lead the way yet, but no doubt will at some point. Or perhaps not. One thing we noticed about content in social media channels in the Caribbean is that they love to share music, video and photo’s, especially that which they’ve created themselves. Facebook doesn’t allow for much “creativity” with it’s pages like some of the social networks in the Caribbean do. Ranking is based on number of members, mentions in news and social media channels and Alexa rank.

Key Topics
Seems like Caribbean folks love to talk about dating and romance. Music closely followed discussions on dating and romance and slipping in at third place is politics. They love to discuss politics within their own countries, the Caribbean as a whole and then global issues. Travel was mostly amongst the various islands but also to other countries, most notably the US, Africa and UK.

Most Active in Social Media
Here we looked at which of the primary countries is most active in social media. We factored in overall population, Internet penetration and adjusted accordingly. The Bahamas leads the way followed by Jamaica and then Trinidad & Tobego. We did not include Cuba in this research.

Summary
The Caribbean overall represents a small market compared to the US or Europe, but when it comes to being online, they are increasingly engaged. Social media usage has only really taken off in the last two years, but they are catching up quickly. Twitter is increasingly popular and they love to blog, create and share videos and images. This is a very expressive and passionate part of the world. Median incomes are rising and there is a growing middle class meaning business opportunities will only increase for marketers. The mobile market is growing rapidly in the Caribbean as well and the people are an increasingly sophisticated market. Any marketers who think otherwise will be making a costly mistake.

Research Notes & Copyright:

The data reported here is approved for release by the respective clients and is in aggregate form. In our research we do not look at the profiles of individuals and we do not report on personal information to clients nor do we collect and store any. Information was collected using our proprietary technology, MS360 and validated by analysts and third party services. Information is subject to change and was considered accurate at the time of the creation of the work product. Data and information herein is copyright MediaBadger Public Affairs Ltd. (Canada) and MediaBadger Ltd. (UK). Please attribute ownership if using the information herein. Further information can be obtained by contacting us.

Phases Of Social Media Use in Civil Change

Egypt and #Jan25 was perhaps the seminal, global wake-up call event of how social media can be used for driving civil change in a society. Some might argue that it was Iran in 2009 with the so-called “Twitter Revolution”. In fact social media did play a key role in the Arab Spring – but it did not start it. And continues to do so. The term “Arab Spring” itself has become a meme (more on that later.) Here we wanted to provide a quick overview of “how” social media tools are being used and the phases around driving civil change through these tools. We think it’s important to note that in the semi-final stage, social media can become irrelevant to the final change.

Phase One – Trigger Event
In Tunisia it was a fruit-stand operator who lit himself on fire to protest government corruption. In Egypt it was meant to be a small protest over the police beating of a so-called “drug dealer” that unintentionally became a drive for regime change. Any drive for change in society starts with a “Trigger Event”, something that gets a large enough portion of the population angry or motivated to start a movement for change. This doesn’t mean government change alone, it may be around a bill before legislation or simply getting a municipal by-law adopted.

Phase Two – Inception & Formation
This is where the “idea” that will become the meme or issue that will likely result in civil change. We call it the Inception Point. Someone starts it by venting on a blog, posting something on Facebook or a YouTube video around the evidence of the issue and may present the initial idea for a solution. It is at this point a number of tools begin to be used that will be used for later planning & organizing

Phase Three – Rallying & Packaging
The idea has gained momentum, perhaps a meme is starting to form. Enough people have come together that the Planning & Organizing element (or Rallying) starts to take on a more susbstantial form, the actors are becoming defined and some form of leadership or hierarchy is forming. Packaging is developed to pull the “idea” together and begin communicating it.

Phase Four – Media Traversal – Key Inflection Point
This is a key inflection point where the issue gains serious legs by being picked up by mainstream media. This can vary depending on the role of mainstream/industrial media in a local, regional or national context. Our research shows that mainstream media plays a vital role in growing awareness around an issue.

Phase Five – Meme Formation & Mass Audience
Depending on mainstream media’s treatment of a story and issue, once there is larger audience buy-in the social media activity takes on a greater intensity. This is a transitional phase towards where we may see it translate from a mostly Cyburbia action into real-world engagement.

Phase Six – Cyber Transference
There may have been street rallies, flash mobs or small demonstrations prior to this point, but it is an inflection point. This is where the masses take to the streets or we see other forms of protest or civil actions taking place outside of Cyburbia. This is a short period as well of perhaps hours.  A number of indicators are at play here with warning signs of impending activity.

Phase Seven – Change Effect & Technology Shift
This is where the use of social media tools takes on a significant shift from planning and organizing to monitoring, documenting and reporting. The original organizing group and the greater online community begin to use these tools (video/photo sharing, blogs, Twitter, Social Networks etc.) to keep momentum going as real-world actions are brought about. Mainstream media may also go into high-gear as a story gains legs and becomes a major issue either locally, regionally, nationally or internationally depending on the scope of the societal changes being sought by citizens. In Egypt, after the government shut down Internet access, instead of driving people home, it actually caused people to wander out into the streets to find out what was happening and they ended up joining the revolution.

Concluding
While this is isn’t how all civil changes occur through the use of social media, we’ve patterned enough uses of the tools in local, regional, national and international contexts to be able to define these phases more clearly. A number of issues can change the steps, cause a campaign to falter or alter course. In developing states much depends on the form of government and that governments approach to social media and the Internet (do they allow free access? Have they co-opted the Internet to produce their own message? etc.) Fringe groups or radicals with extreme views or those in the bane of the conspiracy theorists tend to be marginalized fairly regularly and they rarely gain momentum for change.

The key challenge in monitoring and analysis of these issues is understanding when an “idea” may grow and become a rallying cry that moves into the phases of significant civil society change; whether that’s for local by-laws or overthrowing dictatorships like Egypt and Libya.

Where Social Media & Politics Intersect

There was little doubt that social media played a key role in the election of Obama in 2008. Or did it? Then the recent Canadian election where social media played a key role for the first time and Canada’s political landscape underwent a major shift. But the voting population only increased by almost 2%. Did social media really have an impact? In last years election in the UK, social media tools were used, but nowhere near the degree in either Canada or the US. Yet the UK saw a significant political change to its traditional landscape.

The question that keeps arising then…is social media having an impact on politics? The answer is that we really don’t know. There’s not been a comprehensive, empirical study conducted. And how do you measure that? What are reasonable standards of analysis to draw conclusive hypothesis?

We do an immense amount of work in the public policy sector; not much of it around politics however. At least not yet. We do monitor the elections out of our own interest. We don’t do work for political parties as part of our best practices standards. But from our research projects, we do see where we think politics and social media are and will increasingly, intersect.

Political Culture: A key aspect of social media and the technologies that enable the connections (cameras, laptops, iPad’s, smartphones etc.) is creativity. Very quickly video mashups, images, text tweets and blog posts can be put online and reach the community. The other aspect of these social technologies is the ease of organizing, planning and communicating at almost no cost. Bring these two together and you have a powerful set of tools to drive changes in political culture. A key aspect of political culture is citizens perception of “legitimacy” of the political process in their country.

The Danger - these tools and approaches can be used to build a greater sense of legitimacy in the political system, but can also cause a lot of damage and be used to make the political culture seem less relevant or important. This will be a key consideration for the use of social media by political parties in democratic nations.

Political Behaviour: This is essentially, peoples views on a political party or process. Mostly they are influenced by friends and family, then cultural and ethnic groups and perhaps ones social situation. When it comes to social media, the question arises of it’s impact on political behavior; does it influence change? Or perhaps it further solidifies ones views because of the accessibility of tools and technology to easily express ones views? There is no answer yet, we just don’t know.

The Danger – Further and deeper stratification of peoples views that might lead to a more divisive nation, perhaps causing rifts and polarization that then leads to nation-splitting. A worst-case scenario is a resulting information war that spills into the real world and results in civil conflict.

These two areas are where we see social media impacting and connecting with politics. Some argue social media played a role in sparking the Arab Spring. We somewhat doubt that. Certainly it was a key element in “organizing” and enabling “communication” but the causes were endemic and long-standing. They were sparked in Tunisia by the fellow who set himself on fire and in Egypt by the guy beaten to death by police. Social media was relevant, but only enabled a story to spread (critical as that was.) The impact in well-established democracies however, is still far from known. That social media will have an impact on political culture and behaviour we have little doubt. The evidence however, is not easy to collect and interpretation needs the collective thinking of political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists…fortunately we have them on our consulting team and we continue our research.

But, what do you think?

Cyberlingua: The Problem With Online Translation Tools

We’ve all read them, those abbreviated text terms; LOL, ROFL, BFF…many have made their way into broadcast television shows and Hollywood movies, even sub-culture movies. Such acronyms have gone beyond simple email and txt messaging uses to be a part of daily conversation and play out across a myriad so social networking tools and sites. Then there’s the increasing trend towards “verbing” words…as in “to Google” something. And as our world becomes increasingly digitally connected, comes the challenge of translation.

One of the biggest challenges today is online translation tools; the biggest being “real-time” translation. Sadly, the real-time game of translation is a losing one right now.

A number of issues come into play with real-time translation tools. Chief among them is “how” we communicate online in social media services and through tools like texting in mobile phones. How often do you use the Queen’s English when texting? Or in Google Chat? Right. Not very often.

The best online translation tool out there is Google Translate. And it’s terrible. You can get the “gist” of the meaning of a site, but cultural subtleties and idiosyncratic terms are all but lost. Forget slang and acronyms like “LOL” or “TTYL” are hopelessly lost.

There’s a few companies trying to work this out. Most recently Canadian company Ortsbo managed to get Gene Simmons of KISS fame to help promote the product. It looks nice but there’s not much beyond that. When our linguistics team worked with it they gave it about a 14% success rate on formal language. With cultural terms and acronyms that fell to 3%. We found similar results with IMTranslator (actually worse) and GeoFluent by Lionbridge software. There are a number of other hopefuls, but we’ve yet to see something solid.

The Problems of Language Machine Translation

Volume of Data: For Environment Canada to translate one paragraph of a small weather report a database must consult over 2 million prior weather reports. You need massive amounts of data just to translate a small amount.

Cultural Issues: Let’s take Germany for an example – across the country many different “styles” of German are spoken. Another example is the UK with Scottish, southern English, Midlands English, Welsh English, Cockney and so on. No translation tool can handle this right now. In social media channels, we use cultural terms all the time.

Lexicons: Add to the idiosyncrasies of cultural uses of language comes lexicons. We spend an awful lot of time updating our lexicons. We define a lexicon as specialized terms used in a cultural segment of a population (i.e. cockney) and industry terms (all those acronyms used in ICT or health care as an example.)

The reality is that machine translation is a long way off yet. This space is going to become ever more critical as global trade increases and knowledge economies connect and share software and other technologies. But it is still very much in its infancy.