What’s the Point of Pepsi Refresh?

The first round of the Pepsi Refresh Project has just concluded its first round of funding. The Chronicle reported on the initial grant awards to 32 groups of $1.3 million here.

Pepsi will continue to give out monthly grants until it reaches it’s proposed grant amount of $20 million. That’s all great, but when the awards were announced I began to wonder what it all means. To their credit, Pepsi created a very easy-to-use site, that worked after some initial glitches, and a fairly transparent process (although there are some grumbles of gaming by Pepsi and participants), but, in particular, I keep going back to what Beth wrote initially about the contest, “what’s the theory of change?”

When the contest was first announced it was framed in the media as Pepsi choosing philanthropy over Super Bowl ads. But as Mashable warned, if the campaign worked, “..the company can build brand awareness while also helping out communities across the world. On the flip side, if not executed properly, the company could wind up spending $20 million on philanthropic causes (which is to be commended), without getting the benefits of a buzz-generating ad campaign.”

As Geoff points out, this is quite a delicate dance. He writes, “Perhaps the greatest trend of the moment is the fusion of corporate and philanthropic interests, which in turn is producing growing pains and change. It’s likely that the requirements of online transparency will demand a new era of authenticity in corporate community investment efforts.”

One area of transparency I’d like to see Pepsi transcend is that of their intended outcomes for this effort. Which is it, Pepsi? Are you interested in the kinds of returns that an expensive ad campaign would create? For instance, are you interested in greater sales? Or are you interested in philanthropic outcomes, improved reading skills or greener classrooms or better health outcomes? Or are you betting that that this new form of philanthropy can create a hybrid of the two?  One thing I do know is that if it is philanthropic outcomes, then this model needs to be extended beyond the contest to a platform for reporting and sharing results. I need to know, Pepsi, please tell me!

Social Network Sites Attract Like People – Duh

Mashable has been chock full of an amazing amount of data this week about how we’re using social media. Katya Andresen does a terrific job of highlighting a chunk of it.

One post in particular caught my eye today called “What Social Media Users Want.“  It’s not so much what the article says that is so interseting, it’s what it doesn’t say. In summary it reviews research done by an online advertising firm called Chitka of data collected from the generes of sites receiving traffic from four social networking sites:  – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Digg.

The data show that people with similar interests gravitate to particular sites. If entertainment and music are your overriding interests, then you’re likely to be on MySpace. If news and community lights your fire, then Facebook. And if news if your main driver, then Twitter. Surprisingly, Digg is rather evenly split between the different genres – I would have figured the largest interest of Digg users would have been news.

So, people with the same interests gravitate towards similar online communities. Pretty obvious, eh?  What the article doesn’t say, what it refutes eloquently by not bringing it up, is that these data make it very clear that not everyone needs to be on every platform. When we hear that MySpace usage has leveled off or new Twitter users is slowing the inevitable Chicken Little shouting begins about the demise of that platform or that social media tool. How can Facebook be sustainable if not every, single human being is a member, that logic seems to say. Here’s one article like this about Twitter, and another about Myspace.

That’s just silly talk. Social networking sites need a critical mass of people in order to create vibrant, robust conversations. But not everyone has to be on every platform. This is important for nonprofits to understand because it should help them to answer the question that I get nearly every day, “What tools should we use?” And my answer is always the same, “You should use the channels where the people interested in your issues are gathering. And I can’t know where that is, you have to go and try them.” And now I can also point them to the Mashable article to get a better sense of where those conversations may be.

Time for a Nonprofit Natural Disaster Gameplan

The outpouring of concern and donations for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti confirmed what we already know, people are good hearted and want to help.

Geoff Livingston has done a fantastic job over at  Mashable identifying the five social media lessons learned from Haiti: the maturation of mobile giving,  the unfolding narrative of the disaster shared on channels like Twitter, the integration of social and traditional media, the glossing over of the underlying issues and story of Haiti’s history of poverty and corruption that excerbates natural disasters, the potential for short-attention spans for the long and difficult road to recovery for Haiti.

I’ve also been blown away by the reaction of the tech community, spearheaded by the inexhaustible Andy Carvin of NPR, of an event called Crisis Camp organized by a grassroots networked called Crisis Commons. The commons and the camp are geeks coming together around an urgent need to crowdsource a panoply of efforts to support, in this case Haitian, relief efforts. They include translation, basic maps of the country, mapping of NGO efforts, mobile applications for crisis response, and family reunification systems.

I am struck by a few things from all of this swirl of activity. Just how quickly people can be mobilized to do more than give money is amazing. But there is something else going on. After Katrina, there was a huge gap between the amount of money given by individuals and foundations and the amount given by governments, specifically the difference was $6b from private donors vs. $120b from the government.

That gap will be much closer this time for two reasons in particular: the economy that has strapped individuals and governments and the destitution of the Haitian government. Just a week after the earthquake, Americans had already pledged $275 million for Haiti. The US Government and the World Bank combined had pledged $200 million.

In light of this growth in the size and importance of private donations for natural disasters around the world, we should have some guidelines as a sector on how to advise people to give. This is to avoid the confusion and diffusion of giving that happens in a sector that is genetically predisposed to order of any kind. For instance, many people, including me, immediately added Jean Wyclef’s Yele Haiti to their short list of organizations to give to. My rationale was that they were established in country and could help facilitate the logistical mess of trying to disperse food and aid within the country. But now I think that was a mistake. They aren’t a large organization, they don’t have any particular expertise in disaster relief, and there have been reports of previous financial mismanagement.

I liked Rosetta Thurman’s post here on what to give — and what not to give — for Haitian relief. For instance, she said don’t donate cans or clothing, there is no transportation to get them to Haiti, and even if they were delivered there isn’t the infrastructure to distribute them.

So, here’s my proposal. We need a Nonprofit National Disaster Gameplan for the next disaster. Our efforts are too large now to be ignored, we are not just a shadow of government, or UN or World Bank support efforts. We need an agreed upon plan, similar to what the Crisis Commons is developing of the kind of aid, and the best groups to provide that assistance, in the immediate wake of a disaster.

I know this flies in the face of free choice in funding that we hold so dear as a sector, but, really, folks, don’t you think we can agree that when hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of lives are lost or at risk, we can agree that The Red Cross has to be first responder? But there are others, like CARE and Doctors without Borders. We need to make a short list of the organizations we should endorse who have the size, expertise and expertise to provide support anywhere in the world for a disaster.  Seems to be a good job for Independent Sector.

Women, Social Media and Influence (cont’d)

I’d like to thank the many folks who read and commented on my post last week about Women, Social Media and Influence. Here is what I learned:

• There is interest in measuring the influence of women using social media;
• The unique characteristics of social media, particularly that it is ubiquitous, easy-to-use and mostly free make them the perfect vehicle for women to become more influential outside of the walls of organizations.
• Influence is multi-channel. We think primarily of bloggers as influential individuals online, however, there are influentials on Twitter and Facebook as well and they need to be added to the mix.
• The mom bloggers have illustrated how groups of individuals, all of whom may not be individually influential, can band together in a swarm and have a huge impact. Take the Motrin imbroglio as an example. This is of particular interest for social change because it illustrates how a group of individuals can work together to influence the behavior of a company, which could just as easily been influencing elected officials or foundations.

There were several commenters who brought up the interesting issue of whether women small business owners were doing better using social media. I agree that this is a very interesting question, however, I’m going to leave it to others as it falls outside the parameters of social change.

Many thanks, in particular, to Joanne Fritz for posing a fascinating set of questions: Are women more or less persistent than men when using social media? Do women turn social media into businesses as often as men? Does a male “voice” still carry more “authority” than women in social media? Do women use social media differently? Are women’s issues receiving more attention as a result of women using social media? How do women themselves define influence in social media?

Based on the enthusiasm I decided to keep going and begin to explore how to define and measure online influence. One interesting note, which I think is a great opportunity, is that everything that I have seen to date is for corporate marketers interested in selling things to consumers.

The first important issue to discuss is what, exactly, is online influence?  As you can see in the model social network map below, there are two compoents of social networks: the round nodes that indicate people or institutions, and the ties that connect them to one another. [This map is courtesy of  Valdis Krebs]

In every network like this there are larger nodes. These are the influencers, the people or institutions that are connected to more nodes and are also connected to in return. In more familiar terms, these are the people on your block who know everyone and knows what is going on with them. With social media we can see who these influencers are in a social network for the first time.

Micah Baldwin writing on Mashable listed the ways that influence can be measured online:

Incoming Traffic – Pageviews, Incoming traffic from search engines, rss subscribers

Incoming Links – Primarily manual links such as blogrolls, in-post deep links

Reader Engagement – Internal searches, time on site

Recommendations – Retweets, share stats

Connections – Number of mutual connections, number of mutual connections on multiple sites

Track Record – Age of domain, number of blog posts, length of engagement

Engagement – How often and long a person has engaged with a service online

These influencers have large numbers of followers, readers and friends. They also have reputations as trusted sources of information. And, again, for social change, they can make things happen: donations, raising awareness, organizing events. In a very interesting paper on defining influence and influencers published by Edelman, Jeff Jarvis says that they are not just meme starters (meaning ideas and conversations that are spread through social media) they are also meme spreaders.

As I stated in the previous post, influence is more than the size of a following. What one does with those friends and followers is what’s important. And that’s what needs to be measured! Finding the influencers like Beth is easy – they’re sitting right there in the blogosphere or on Twitter. But what do they do with their influence for social change is the real question. And as Joanne Fritz said, do women do whatever this is differently from men online?  Based on this information, I’d like to propose a framework for a research project  based on the following questions:

• Are there influential women using social media for social change? If so, who are they and what does their influence consist of?
• Is the influence of women exhibited differently using social media than that of men? If so, how?
• Can we follow the bouncing ball of a social change meme that began with women influencers and map how it spread online and perhaps on land?
• Are their barriers for women’s leadership using social media?

Please let me know what you think about these questions and this approach. Thanks!!

Facebook Is Run by Jewish & Asian Mothers

According to Mashable, if you want to deactivate your Facebook account you will get the following guilt-ridden message, “Are you sure you want to deactivate your account, [friend name] will miss you.” This message is accompanied by five photos of friends who, presumably, would miss you terribly if you were gone.

Did Facebook focus group this approach with a sample of Jewish and Chinese mothers who are the world best guilt givers?

Seriously, it’s hard to know whether to to be appaled or impressed. On the one hand, it is a clever marketing approach. On the other hand, it seems to me that someone who deactivates from their account are very aware of the friends that they no longer want to connect with on this particular social media channel.

But there is a larger issue here, and it is the ongoing passive aggressive relationship that Facebook has with its users. The struggle that they are groping their way through as to how to maintain their momentum of adding new users as an astonishing pace, increase its valuation in order to make itself increasingly attractive to advertisers and potential buyers is, at times, uncomfortable to watch.

I have written about the discomforting disconnect between the corporate face of Facebook and the robust, Facebook social network that we, the customers and users and their raison d’etre, experience every day.  And this is yet another example of it.

Why shouldn’t people be allowed to leave Facebook easily and guilt free?

People come and go in social networks – and they should be encouraged to do both. Networks need to be easily accesible to newcomers, and by the same token it is important that they be allowed to leave when they want to. Facebook really needs to begin to reconcile it’s financial interests with it’s responsibilities as a host to people’s personal social networks. Maybe a few minutes with Craig Newmark might help to clarify the difference.

My advice to the Facebook folks (because I know they’ve been waiting for my advice!) is make it as easy to go as it was to enter, and give people very, very good reasons for wanting to rejoin.

Note: Based on feedback fromLisa C. Hoang on Twitter, the title of this piece was changed from Chinese to Asian mothers.

Mashable’s Summer of Social Good

Mashable has announced a giving campaign that runs from June 1st through August 28th of this year to raise money for four terrific causes; The Humane Society, Oxfam, World Wildlife Fund and LiveStrong.

It will be very intersting to see how this effort unfolds. Mashable is a very widely read site with amazing reach on a host of other channels like Twitter and Facebook. As Jocelyn wrote, “I’m excited to see how this campaign unfolds as it will provide additional benchmarks and information regarding the ROI of social media and how nonprofits can best use these channels.”

So, of course, I wish them well and hope the Summer of Social Good turns out better than the Summer of George. But I was stopped short when I read the first sentence on the Mashable’s site about the campaign, “Summer of Social Good is the first large scale online charitable campaign to raise funds strictly online through the power of Social Media and the Internet.” This is simply not true, in particular they would have been well served to take a peek at how America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by The Case Foundation unfolded. As a result of that fifty day effort over 80,000 people gave $1.7 million.

But more than the total numbers of people who gave and total dollar amount that they gave, The Challenge (FYI: Beth and I authored an assessment report of the Challenge that will be released by the Foundation this month)

What that Challenge had that the Summer of Social Good is a sense of urgency for donors, without which it is too easy for people who intend to give, want to give, mean to give, to just put it off. The urgency of the Challenge resulted from the financial match that The Case Foundation offered daily and at the end of the effort to reward the causes that raised the largest number of friends not dollars. A sense of urgency to motivate people to give also came from the length of the campaign (which was too long at 50 days) and a leader board that provided real-time data for participants to know how there were doing.

Again, I hope that the Summer of Social Good is phenomenally successful, just wish they had built their effort on the lessons learned from previous campaigns.