Civil Society Groups & How They Use Social Media

From the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Keystone XL issue and even down to small, localised activities, civil society groups (from radical left-wing activists to the average and necessary protest) have figured out social media and are making increasingly effective use of it. Below, we’ve provided a diagram of how these groups, some that have been around a long time, others that just form for a short period, are using these tools. Businesses would do well to understand them and the processes for marketing, investor and public relations.

In the Management block, we can see how social media tools are used to manage the administrative functions of the group. In this case they may use email, a Facebook group, Wiki’s and other tools, that are a mix of “open” to the public and private. In the second block, Communication, we see how they use the various tools to communicate/broadcast the messages developed as a team. All forms of digital content are used across multiple platforms (e.g. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr etc.) Once the content and creative has been released it moves to the “Engagement” phase, where the grassroots group enters into dialogue with the general public, answering questions and ensuring the message is consistent and understood by the public and hopefully shared. The Actions shows how once the message is out there (i.e. “meet at the town hall, wear your t-shirts and bring signs at 2PM”) it can result in a number of real-world activities. The green circle indicates that if an event in public or online piece of content (e.g. video) is successful, the general public shares the results of the activity that took place in public and the feedback communications loop is triggered (the green line returning to the communications block.) Once news media picks up on a story, such as a highly successful public rally, this transitions the story to a broadcast public, usually significantly increasing recognition for the civil society group and expanding their message. Social Media is a highly cost-effective route to organizing, creating and communicating a mission. Traditional news media then plays a vital role in expanding audience attention and driving further public actions.

We have seen this process used in a number of actions over the past two years. It works and has become highly effective. The gap we often find that our business and government clients miss, is that these social media is simply a set of tools used to galvanize support and actions that take place in the real world. They might see videos after  a protest or action and say “oh well, yeah, we know that happened.” But the same tools were used beforehand to organize the rally. Those affected by these necessary and key parts of a democracy could, however, be better prepared.

The Next Big Thing in Social Media is Television

Yes, television. That old hunk of electronics is going through some major overhauls and it may very well be where Apple will be disrupting things yet again. You can easily connect your telly to the Internet today. Most via devices like AppleTV or Boxee, SlingBox and others are simply streamers of content via online channels. But the biggest problem isn’t the features and functions of these devices. Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba and all the others are building in processors to their TV’s already with no need for hanging devices like an AppleTV. The biggest issue is input – it’s just not easy to use a little remote control to type in a blog post, let alone a “tweet”. Added to this is little capability for engagement – its much like the Internet pre-social media.

But that engagement is coming. Within a two years, perhaps less, you’ll be able to send a “tweet” when watching a show telling others what you’re watching. Perhaps rate, tag and comment on a movie you’re watching or songs you’re listening to. Already Apple has enabled the use of an iPad via Apple Remote to interface with an AppleTV.

Once software companies and major social media technology brands like Facebook and Google+ figure out easy ways to input and interact with the television set a whole new slew of tools will be available and television will see a renewal of content and applications. This will also present several new challenges in regards to privacy, content rights and revenue models. On the revenue side, it will likely impact in increased “splitting” of fees amongst carriers and creators. To offset broadcasters and carriers desire to have “metered” access, content creators will likely pay “gateway” fees to have their content delivered over networks. Eventually the consumer will pay for this. We also suspect that micropayments will take off significantly when the integration of television and the Web happen – already we see this with Apple in regards to shows and movies. Consumers will face greater complexity in buying and leasing content in the near term. A complexity that may damage the business models. It’s been quite easy to turn on the telly and just flick through channels and that form of media consumption will not change for a very long time.

But social media tools and services will hit television and it will spark a new level of application development and entirely new social media tools and interactions. We continue to see in our research the adoption of more “social technologies” and limited growth in “single user apps” such as photo editing software (even those apps are seeing integration of social elements.) We have little doubt that in short order, televisions will come with a hard drive.

So the question then becomes…what are men going to do when the easy to hold remote is gone?

The Problem With Klout & Influence Metrics

Measuring and influence and authority misses something very big and, as it turns out, very important. But some disclosure first; we have software that runs analysis on text and data and measuring “influence” and “authority” is just one of the features of our software. And we have a lot of heated discussions about methodologies. So we have an issue with ourselves, just as we find a major fault in the tools that measure influence. Klout gets the most buzz. But then Klout is looking at influence for one purpose – to monetize “market mavens” for their reach – the less influence you have, the less they care about you. Or anyone who’s monetizing influencers in social media.

But when it comes to actual information that becomes “intelligence” (we’re not talking “secret agent” intelligence here, we’re talking intelligence so you can make a decision), its often not the influential people, who deliver the content/information that is crucial. In fact, it often comes down to just one comment on Twitter. One blog post, one short video, one photo.

Case In Point
As we analysed Haitians use of social media as it related to the Cholera outbreak where they accused the Nepalese soldiers of trying to commit genocide (which is ridiculous), it was one short video that made all the difference. It was a video of Nepalese soldiers in a big white truck with “UN” on the side dumping garbage into a river. It was one person who shot a short video and uploaded it. That person has no big profile online, they are not a person of “influence”. But it was critical.

This is very much the Power Law Curve. It’s a law that has had huge impact in the open source software world; specifically with Linux, in which it wasn’t about 1,000 software engineers delivering an equal amount of input, but one “coder” that provided that one piece of critical code that made everything come together. That was all they produced, but it made the difference.

For companies like Klout, they don’t much care about these non-influential types. That’s OK. They’re in the business of selling influential people to marketers who want to promote a product. That’s their business and they do it very well.

But this can be dangerous for marketers, because they end up focusing their attention on these people of influence. Those with the influence work to get more influence so they get products or deals like discounts. And social media monitoring tools all look at the “macro” of social media, missing the micro. In addition, they only focus on the “mainstream” social media channels, the big brands like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. They miss all those other key places where conversations happen and so they may very well miss what actually matters.

It is unlikely that many marketers have the ability or willingness to go beyond their already stressed work overload to deal with adding this consideration into the mix. But it is a good question to ask every now and then. A marketer may uncover some critical information, or a government department may get some good citizen insight.

Consumer & Citizen Usage of Social Media Tools

We’ve written a number of posts on our research into social media usage across many demographics and market segments. With our two core practice units; public policy and marketing, we decided to see if there were similarities in how the “citizen” uses social media (i.e. for public policy issues) versus the “consumer” in marketing terms (i.e. purchase investigation and general content.) And, perhaps unsurprisingly, we see similarities in the use of the tools; what changes of course, is the nature of the content and the engagement between the two.

Citizen Vs. Consumer – Passion for Speaking Out
When it comes to topics and issues of “public policy” (e.g. taxes, government policy, roads, schools etc.)  we found that in a ratio of passion, citizen issues get shared and discussed far more than product or service discussions at (citizen:consumer) 7:3, which we term as “passion” out of the 2,500 use cases we looked at. We’re more likely to be engaged over issues of our society than just products. For those of you despairing we are nothing more than some kind of “buying machine” – take heart. When we looked at the four layers of concern, we found local issues to be first, followed by national, then global, then regional in the U.S., Canada and UK.

A Trend Line Appears
It seems that there may be hope for our “purely consumptive society” that we feel we live in. People as “citizens” are more apt to share and be passionate about issues of civil society in social media channels than they are about brands and products. As we looked at data from 2006 up to the end of October, we can see that since 2008, people have been more active on “citizen” issues than consumer products. We suspect that in 2011 the Occupy movement has been a part of this. We did not exclude Occupy as it is a serious component of civil society dialogue online at this time. We also note the rise of the Arab Spring. The trigger seems to be 2008 and the rise of the global financial crisis. Our sample size was 4,000 identities tracked over this period of time in public social media channels (we do not look at private content, nor do we release or share information on individuals.)

Conclusion
To draw deeper conclusions we would have to delve a lot more deeper into the issues. But in general, we have a clearer indication that people are discussing issues of Civil Society more than brands and products today in Western nations. We did not look at non-Western or non-English speaking regions/countries. What are your thoughts? Are we seeing an increase in citizen concern filtering through social medias?

The Opportunity for Social Media Apps is Niche Markets

Facebook has become the biggest social network. Twitter dominates the microblog segment and WordPress all but rules the blogging world platforms of choice. The stakes have been stuck in the ground for the cyber digital territory of “mega-apps”. Our research is showing that the new opportunity for social media apps is servicing niche communities (for social networking) and for other tools it’s also all about the niche.

While we wouldn’t say for sure that there couldn’t be another Facebook or Twitter size of social media app, it is unlikely until technology becomes more invisible. Now it is all about servicing niche groups. And the most successful of those will likely be on mobile devices such as SmartPhones and tablets. We see this trend continuing for the next 2-3 years.

Why?
Out of the 50 research projects we reviewed for data on social media apps use, we have noted  that people will maintain a Facebook presence, but  will be 34% more active in a niche social network (e.g. for golfing or other sports.) This is a 18% increase over 2010 and 36% CAGR since 2009. Facebook has failed to hang on in any meaningful way to niche groups. Google is attempting this with Google+ Hangouts. We are seeing some traction for Hangouts but it is too early to know and the API’s into Google+ are not available yet to analyse. The reason, we speculate, is that people will be most engaged in the places where they’re the most interested. Even recently launched UnThink is a niche play and will never be on a scale of Facebook.

Why This Is Good
For those services like FourSquare, Yelp, Vimeo, UnThink or newcommer Trapit, this is actually not a bad thing. The customers/users they do gain will tend to be more loyal and once established there, they will prefer to stay there. We note that there is an “economic value” to a persons information (i.e. social graph, contact info, avatar etc.) and once established, they are unlikely to move. Our research indicates that the longer someone stays in a social media service, the less likely they are to leave. Even if they don’t engage that often.