Social Media

I’m off to Chicago in November to present our paper ‘Engaging With Stakeholders: Mobile Diaries for social design’ at the Conference on Designing for User Experience. The paper describes our work on mobile diaries and design research methods over the last 18 months. The act of doing these kinds of collaborative design activities with our clients and their stakeholders produces rich results. As well as generating data that inspires our future design work the research facilitates a co-design process in itself. This can lead to the generation of content by participants, as well as a reflection on, and change in existing practice. Kinda of a Participatory Design meets User Generated Content.

Read the rest of this entry »
Make a comment »

Priscilla has posted about an interesting report looking at the use of “Web2.0″ tools by non-profits.

The crux is that non-profits are finding it hard to work out what might work to them. My experience is that fundraisers usually want to use these tools to cut to the chase and ask for money. Unfortunately, that rarely works.

Read the rest of this entry »
Make a comment »

In addition to the social and fun aspects of Flickr, the site can also be is a fantastic resource when searching for low-cost photographs for use outside of the photo-sharing site.

Many photos on the site are licensed under Creative Commons licenses, which may permit you to use the photos for non-profit and, in some cases, commercial purposes.

Read the rest of this entry »
Make a comment »

I am working through a backlog of blog reading today and spotted Seth Godin’s post Bobcasting (and Google Reader).

In the post he covers a few points, but specifically related to “Bobcasting” he writes:

I want to suggest something that takes no new technology but could have a big impact on the way you do business: Bobcasting.

I call it that because instead of reaching the masses, it’s just about reaching Bob. Or Tiasha. Or any individual or small group.

The future of online communication is micro-pockets of people getting RSS feeds in their Google Reader or on their Google home page. Amazon updates? Bobcast em to me. Fogbugz summaries for the customer service manager? Bobcast her three times a day.

I’m not sure if Seth knows, but the “Bobcast” already exists…

About a year ago Digital Eskimo ran an ‘Innovation Workshop’ with the Greens political party about ways that Bob Brown, the party’s leader, could use technology to better communicate with his supporters.

The result was ‘BobCasts‘ – a podcast enabled by Bob using his mobile phone to leave a message, that was then distributed using podcasting technology (RSS in particular – you can subscribe using your RSS reader or “podcatcher” using this RSS feed).

One of the things that worked well was the personal nature of the approach – it was like Bob was leaving a message specifically to each supporter.

As far as we know, Bob was the first politician to podcast in this way (in fact, I’m not aware of any politician podcasting here in Australia).

So Seth’s “Bobcasts” are already a reality Of course, that’s not quite the point of his post, but I just had a chuckle and thought I’d pass it on…

Make a comment »

Like many other people I subscribe to iTunes’ weekly email newsletter to keep up-to-date with the latest releases on the iTunes store.

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to see this in my inbox:

It is a promotion for a release of John Lennon cover songs by famous artists aiming to raise awareness of the genocide taking place in the Sudan. I flagged it as a great use of social media (in a pretty loose definition of the term) for a cause.

Today I came across a second article in Wired on how activists have demonstrated Google Earth’s potential as a live-saving humanitarian tool, and then received corporate backing from Google itself in support of the initiative.

It’s great to see Darfur getting this attention and seeing the role these popular online services are playing in supporting the cause.

(As an aside, the folks at Campaign Monitor did a terrific review of HTML email best practices which includes a graphic illustration of why the iTunes newsletter is pretty bad from an accessibility and technical perspective. Good food for thought when designing your newsletter.)

Update: I neglected to mention that I first heard about Darfur and the genocide through blogs – Jim Moore’s to be precise – around June 2004. Shortly after reports started coming some of Jim’s friends started Passion of the present as a way of sharing information and organising a grass roots effort.

Make a comment »

And succeeds, it would appear. Laurel points to Toyota’s Greek blogging experiment.

The money quote in her post:

…bloggers only allegiance is to their passion and their conscience. So if your car (product/service) sucks, a magazine might be ‘even handed’ in their review. After all, you also pay for advertising, and they want to be invited to press events again. Bloggers will simply say it sucks and lists the reasons why. And that is the crux of the matter – why people trust social media and complete strangers to ‘expert testimony’ and ‘trained journalism’.

I had an interesting discussion with a bunch of webbies who work for NGOs last night down the pub and we were chatting about social media. One of the folks mentioned that a friend works for an broadband internet service provider and spent an enormous amount of time responding to a few critical voices in discussion groups and blogs – defending his company essentially.

My first question was “is the criticism he’s defending against valid?” Social media is not a particularly good idea if what you’re actually doing/offering is not very good or unethical.

But, the point was well taken – tracking and engaging in social media can be very time consuming, and it’s important to evaluate where to invest your energy (and when to just protect your brand).

I’d like to actually start to put together some thoughts on when social media is a good idea, when it’s not, and what sort of resources are required. But in the meantime, Priscilla recently posted a great method of evaluating which social media tools might work best for your organisation. (And then takes her own advice to great effect.)

Make a comment »

Sounds like it. I’ve been following a thread from Thomas Hawk on his Flickr profile for the past month or so on actions by Flickr to censor comments on discussion threads and certain photos because of blog.

Yahoo! seem to have mis-stepped on this issue fairly significantly. But it also highlights one of the risks of using third-party social media sites to host your content – you are agreeing to the terms of service, and those terms may not be as open as you’d like.

That isn’t to say you shouldn’t take advantage of such sites to further your cause or simply to share your personal photos. But, as with all such things, “free” doesn’t necessarily mean free.

Update: Priscilla chimes in, and mentions the Against Censorship Flickr group which I neglected to post.

Make a comment »

Olivia Ratten, a design student at Swinburne University, approached me to do a quick interview for a uni assignment on "social sustainability" – what follows is the results of the interview.

But first, a tiny bit of context. I wasn’t sure entirely what Olivia meant by "social sustainability", so I asked and this was her response:

The best example I have been presented on designing for social sustainability is the work of Architect and former Mayor of Curitiba (Brazil) Jaime Lerner. The garbage recycling system he introduced in the 80’s improved the local environment, saved money for industry and provided new jobs for those who may otherwise be unemployable. In addition a green trading system provided fresh food to those in serious poverty in exchange for recyclable garbage that couldn’t be collected by ordinary means.

There are many similar examples of systems he created that reward citizens for contributing to the environment by providing them with goods and services they need, meaning no one should be neglected. I see ’social sustainability’ as a holistic term that provides for all members of a society and in this example it is clear that ’social sustainability’ and ‘environmental sustainability’ go hand in hand and members of a society need to contribute to a society and it’s environment in order for it to remain sustainable.

The next question that needs answering is – Which society? When discussing social sustainability in the context of digital media I can discuss specific groups like members of a forum, or a city or the whole world. So I am attempting to cover both specific online groups and local geographical societies – cities/countries.

What’s really exciting to us is that a design student is researching this as part of their course-work! Although my responses aren’t directly related to the kind of sustainability work Olivia mentions above, hopefully they will be of some interest regardless.

The full interview is over the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »
Make a comment »