Social Media Bans

First Pakistan banned Facebook for the user-created event that invited people to draw the prophet, Muhammad, to show Muslin extremists that people were not scared of the kinds of threats that have been doled out to cartoonists in the recent past. Then the government of Pakistan decided they would add YouTube, and certain pages on Flickr and Wikipedia to the ban list.

This is an interesting early effect of globalization. Certain countries, like China and Thailand, decide they do not want their people to have completely free access to all of the news and ideas coming out of other countries. But was Pakistan's ban more than that? Did the thousands of Muslims in Pakistan who protested Facebook have just cause to be angry? When using social media tools to reach global audiences, do we need to be more sensitive to alternative views and religions?

If the Facebook event had not encouraged people to draw the prophet (which is extraordinarily offensive to Muslims), if it had instead asked for discussion on the topic for example, would that have been as affective and not offensive? It it one thing to make a great point, but if your point causes the entire social media platform to be banned in that country (not to mention the thousands of people you made angry) is it still a point that needs to be made?

I'm not sure. I am an avid believer in freedom of the press, of course, and I think the global reach of social media tools is one of the most exciting things about them, but how do we approach possible censorship? If we give in to making our messages more politically correct are we guilty of allowing censorship to exist?

Interestingly enough, the Pakistani government has not yet banned Twitter. Let's see how long that lasts....

Using Twitter and Facebook to Promote Your Issue

Instead of using them just to be able to say "We're on Twitter and Facebook!" There are so many ways to use social media as popular as Twitter and Facebook are around the world to your advantage but not without a strategy. Treat Twitter and Facebook like any other aspect of your campaign: set goals, plan, act, and then evaluate.

The concept of using social media in campaigns is not a new one. In fact, in the dawn of the internet, the "Aryan Resistance" attempted to use online groups to spread their message and gain supporter. To read their frightening yet surprisingly useful tips for social media, visit DrDigiPol.com.

Some of the useful advice we can take from the "Aryan" strategy are:

1. Seek out other groups with similar goals/messages and connect with them, share your org's ideas
2. "Create posts that are succinct and self-sustaining." Man, were they right about that! You don't have much time to get/hold people's attention, so keep it short, clear, and informative.
3. Post often and a lot. When using social media platforms, your group or page must look active and exciting. It is also nice if you respond to all individual comments made on your page, so people feel involved in the cause.
4. When someone joins your group or "follows" you on Twitter, contact them! As the extremely helpful DigiActive Guide to Twitter Activism reminds us, we should not direct message users when they follow us on Twitter, since the direct message is a rarely used, special function on this site. Keep it casual, tweet at the new user, welcoming them and giving them some info or a link to your Web site/upcoming event, something to let them know how to get more involved if they so desire. With Facebook, you can post on their wall or simply invite them to an event with a personal message etc.

DigiActive's Guide to Facebook Activism has some great ideas on how to most effectively use Facebook for a causes, the best of which I will list here:
1. Make your group page interesting and update frequently. Post multimedia and links to your page and invite group members to do so as well. Since people don't spend too much time on any one Facebook page, keep your group description succinct, and update it with the most relevant news and the few upcoming events every week or so.
2. Invite users to comment and listen to their ideas. If you get some good contributions, highlight them in messages or on the group page to encourage other submissions and to let your members know this is their organization.
3. Make your plan for Facebook and then ask your members to help in every part of the process. Facebook groups are an eclectic bunch, so chances are you'll have people who can build media lists in various cities, people who can design flyers, write press releases, post in blogs, or recruit lots of other members. Use them!
4. Since Facebook is used all over the country and the world, encourage group participation in event-planning, etc. If you want members to organize protests in their respective cities or college campuses, allow active members in those areas to customize the events the way they think will best attract attention and gain followers and then invite them to share multimedia and feedback on how the events went.

DigiActive's Guide to Twitter Activism is a great tool to get more familiar with Twitter tools and language and also offers these great activism tips:
1. Use the hash tags (#) in your tweets to attract traffic to your page, and encourage your followers to hash your cause/group name to also direct people to your initiative.
2. Since Tweets are tiny and not the most informative, use Twitter to direct people to the videos on your YouTube channel, the events and activities on your Facebook page, the news articles you have on Digg, or the new content you have on your Web site.
3. Twitter is great for "swarm intelligence" and "collective action." If you tweet a hashtag (#) for Healthcare protest photos (#healthcare_protest_photos), at the end of the day you can search that tag and get an entire user-generated history of photos. It is also great for spontaneous collective action or real-time updates since many use Twitter on their mobile phones.
4. Find and connect with other activists on Twitter. Follow them, re-tweet them, and start the conversation that could lead to a joint-event, some member crossover, or maybe just an interesting idea/cause to share with your followers.
5. Keep track of twitter activity with a Twitter desktop application: http://twitter.com/downloads.

Have your own tips or experiences using social media for activism? Comment them here!

DigiActive is also a great resource for ongoing tips and information about using social media.

Finding the Right Message

I recently read Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations which is a study on how society's behaviors are changing to make use of new technology. I was excited to discover different ways the general public is using social media and how they like to be reached through it. Unfortunately, Shirky's book was more of a collection of case studies about how people are using social media with very little insight into how organizations can tap into those new behaviors.

There was one example I did find helpful though. It was a case study about how an ordinary citizen used social media to force the NYPD to take action. Evan Guttman's friend Ivanna lost her cell phone in cab. She asked him to help her find it by emailing the phone to see who had it. Turns out, the new owner of the phone was a teenage girl who was not about to give back the phone and had no problem taunting Evan and Ivanna. So, Evan started a blog with updates on the different things they tried to get the phone back and eventually received so many comments from empathetic people that he started a discussion forum as well.

After a few weeks, the media picked up this story as an extraordinary example of how social media could connect people. With the press coverage, the NYPD (who had originally dismissed Evan and Ivanna's pleas for help) actually helped them get the phone returned.

The key here is how powerful and engaged all of these strangers became in this event because of the way the message was framed. As Shirky puts it:

"Had [Evan] presented his mission in completely self-interested terms ("Help my friend save $300!) or in unattainably general ones ("Let's fight theft everywhere!"), the [social media] tools he chose wouldn't have mattered. What he did was to work out a message framed in big enough terms to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence."

This is the goal for all campaigns striving to use social media to unite and organize people. Tell an interesting story with a universal appeal and people will rally behind it.

Twitter Can Help the Unemployed!

It's true. Every day people are thinking up more creative ways to use the social networks we already have. Some people think social networks are for the self-involved or the exhibitionist, but the longer these networks are in place, the more avenues we discover from them.

Brian McCullough, writer of the blog JobBored, writes blogposts to answer people's questions about how to find and secure a job. After answering a good deal of these questions, he realized he could use Twitter to more effectively connect people in their job searches. If he could get all of his readers to follow his twitter account, JobEachDay, that twitter account would be a community of job seekers. He could then randomly pick one user each day to tweet their question instead of submitting it just to him. Instead of receiving his answer, they could receive answers from many of the followers and anyone else listening on Twitter.

It's the old two heads are better than one.

With so many educated people on Twitter, the chances of someone reading the question of the day and being able to answer it or maybe even provide a job opportunity are very high. Plus, since everyone is different, JobEachDay will produce many solutions to each problem, so the tweeter can get a wealth of advice all at once, completely free. This may put a market of resume builders and cover letter wizards out of business.

Or, it may prove to be another kind of information hub just as wikis and info sites like ChaCha and e-How also utilized the knowledge of the crowd.

To read more about the JobEachDay experiment, click here.