The Revolution is Tweeted, Does it Matter?

There has been much ado over the last two days over the role of Twitter in reporting and spurring on the election protests in Iran. The outrage of Twitterers that cable news wasn’t covering the election swayed the MSM, particularly CNN, according to the Times.  The Revolution will be Twittered Andrew Sullivan breathlessly declared of the power of Twitter and Millennials (who actually don’t use Twitter here in the US as much as they use Facebook) to shape events and the coverage of them. And then, of course, the pushback from smart commentators, like Tom Watson, declaring quite firmly that the Revolution Won’t be Twittered! Tom warns about the “catnip” quality of Twitter for jouanlists looking to crown the little digital tool as a catalyst of revolutions. He writes:

But I think there are limits, especially when men and women are marching in streets patrolled by the troops of an absolutist religious dictatorship, facing soldiers’ guns in public and the noose behind the prison wall. Sure, Twitter (and Facebook and text messaging and blog and YouTube) can be effective information outlets for revolutionaries, but it’s utterly facile to suggest that information technology is driving the currents of unrest in Iran. I can understand the impulse, though; after all, we (the digerati, the plugged in, the Twitterverse) are watching it unfold online. And, you know, wherever we are, well, that’s where the action is.

But there are interesting lessons here, both positive and negative, that are important to highlight as we continue to learn how best to use social media during fast-paced social events. Here are a few thoughts that I hope others will continue to expand upon:

1. This weekend certainly showed that the mainstream media is listening to closely to what is being tweeted about them. In fact, that may be one of the most powerful aspects of Twitter, the fact that journalists are using it as part of their practice of finding stories, hearing from more voices and distributing their stories makes it a great vehicle for communities of people to shout loudly at them and be heard. We’ve been shouting for a while, but being heard is quite another thing.

2. To remind us that there are no silver bullets. It is so tempting to want to annoint the latest tools; Twitter this year, Facebook last year, blogs the year before, as THE catalyst for social change. There are lots of different channels on which to have lots of different conversations and no one tool or conversation creates a revolution. There is a rich stew of social media and it is the combination of them that we need to keep trying to understand and use for social change.

3.  As Jeff Jarvis pointed out this morning (via Twitter, of course!) @jeffjarvis: To a reporter today that Twitter is not news source.Source of tips & temperature & sources. Reporting follows. Twitter doesn’t replace journalism, it is a first cut, real-time stream of conversations and information, some of which is helpful, most of which is either restating the observations of other people or false rumor. But that’s what history is before it’s history, isn’t it? Just a jumble of events, conversations, observations for others to make sense.

I was thinking this morning about the remarkable juxtaposition of the twentieth anniversity of Tiananmen Square last week and the Iranian protests this week. The only thing the world knew of the Chinese protests were still photographs of incredibly brave young people protesting together, or singly standing right in front of tanks, that we saw hours later. Compare that to the real-time reporting from within Iran by brave people using whatever tools were working, cell phones before they went down, Flckr, Facebook, and Twitter, to tell the world what is happening right now. I’ll take the real-time social media stew anytime and leave it to others to figure out what’s historically important later!

AIG Does It Again

Just when you thought AIG couldn’t sink any lower or act any more despicable, this in yesterday from the New York Post:

Insurance giant AIG is trying to seize a $490 million charitable endowment — and claw back $27 million it already awarded to New York charities — to pay executive bonuses.

The story is a very complicated web of an offshore company called Starr International Co., created to fund bonuses and retirement funds for AIG employees. But Starr also underwrote the Starr International Foundation which are the funds the company now wants back to pay bonuses to employees.

Any story that has AIG and bonuses seems destined to highlight the tone deafness of the company. But there is another story here as well which is the tension that often develops between company founders, Hank Greenberg, who become enamored of their ability to use company stock to create philanthropic entitites, and future managers who may feel less charitable.

Sean Stannard-Stockton writes about a big shift in corporate philanthropy of focusing on the effect of their giving rather than on the package of the gift itself.  Too much corporate giving has focused on looking good rather than doing good. But I don’t think corporations should get stuck on measuring too much. They generally give to ultra image safe programs that are simply good to do; donations to food banks and books for kids and breast cancer research.

But what they do have to think about is being good citizens in their communities. I dispute the notion that the only purpose of companies is to make money. They are important entities in their communities and should model good citizenship as well.  Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have continued to recognize their great importance as citizens of the DC area through their ongoing, albeit smaller, giving efforts. On the other hand, one of the saddest moment of the economic downturn this year as the closing of the New York Times and Boston Globe Foundation.

AIG continues to show its true colors; green for greed and yellow for deceit.

Nonprofit Advice to Business Schools and MBAs

According to this article in the Times yesterday, Business Schools are struggling to figure out what they should be teaching their students to stop producing Gordon Gekkos who are primarily interested in short-term profits.

That’s easy, and I have the answer and am willing to give it to them for free!

They should be teaching their MBAers to act like the best nonprofits and the creative, ingenious peopel who run them. They should be sending out into the business world executives who understand the principles and power of the Connected Age; people like Premal Shah of Kiva.org, Amanda Rose the extraordinary force behind Twestival and charity:water, and Carie Lewis the creative and humble online marketing manager of the Humane Society.

Here’s what these nonprofit visionaries could teach the  MBA class of 2009:

• Open systems can’t be closed again, and that’s a good thing.  Proprietary thinking, closed systems are antithetical to the Connected Age. This is the crux of the struggle of the newspaper industry right now. (Read David Johnson’s outstanding reflection piece on the newspaper industry to learn more.) Being open to people, ideas, information leads to greater opportunities and greater profitability in the long run.
• Learn to manage networks not organizations. Every person, every company is part of an intricate and growing ecosystem of other people and companies. Executives need to learn to manage networks not companies or organizations to be successful.
• Relationships trump brands. We know how to see through advertising and marketing lingo and can decide if a company is really interested in us or not. Successful organizations create open and honest relationships with us. This happens through conversations online and on land, using tools like Meetup, and Twitter.
• Metrics can’t produce good products.  Wall Street became more interested in making money than investing in good products.  You can spin out all of the fancy metrics and powerpoint presentations that you like, at the end of the day companies make products and nonprofits help people and communities.  When we lose focus on those fundamental things; when we’re more interested in short-term profits and pleasing foundations our products and communities suffer.
• The Cluetrain Manifesto should be required reading for every MBA class.
• Governing boards don’t work, if they did we wouldn’t be in this mess. Every major financial institution had a board of directors that rubber stamped bad plans, bad motives, bad operations on the part of senior executives. The boards of AIG, Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac let short-term profits trump common sense and sustainability. As David Renz writes, “Governance is a function and a board is a structure.” Many grassroots nonprofit organizations hae a long history of involving their communities in the governance of their organizations — with the long-term well being of their communities in the forefront of their thinking.

Every MBA class should have a visit from one of these winners of the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship, so should ever company left on Wall Street.

The tide has shifted and nonprofit entrepreneurs and managers have a lot to teach the business world — if they’d listen.  There is an opportunity right now to do something we’ve never done before; reverse the polarity of excellent organizational practices from the for profit sector to the nonprofit sector; and take what we know has worked well to make nonprofit organizations, particularly those with the DNA of the Connected Age, and reinvent American business.

What the NFL Can Teach Communities

My husband shared this fantastic op-ed from the Times with me the other day.  In short, the NFL is arming fans with a text number so that they can report unruly and vulgar fans to security quickly and privately.

This is certainly  a huge help to fans, particularly with children in tow, who want to enjoy a game and not hear beer-sloshed men spew obscenities nearby. But now imagine what else can be done with text messaging to make communities safer. What if your neighborhood in East Baltimore is being overridden by drug dealers, here’s a way to report it quickly, safely and securely to the police. And kids can report other students bringing weapons to school.

Of course, you’re saying to yourself, text messaging has been around for a while, what’s the big deal? The deal is this: old, slow moving institutions are finally waking up to the fact that social media can help them to engage their constituencies, whether it’s a fan or a resident or a student, in immediate and safe ways.  Tools like texting, Twitter, blogs and IM aren’t going away, they certainly shouldn’t, and at last they are becoming part of the toolkit of engagement and participation by all organizations.

From Spoof to Social Change

There was much aflutter in New York City yesterday when a group of volunteer activists released and distributed a fake copy of the New York Times with a banner headline announcing the end of the Iraq War.  Upon further examination readers saw that the paper was postdated July 4, 2009.

I spoke this morning to two organizers of the effort, Beka Economopoulos and Andy Bichlbaum, about how this massive effort (it took over a year to organize and hundreds of volunteers to pull off) was organized and successfully managed.  It wasn’t free,

The effort was organized similarly to other networked activism efforts in that it had the following key components:

• A flat structure with no one person in charge.  This doesn’t mean that these efforts are headless.  Instead, it means that leaders emerge because of their passion, or great facilitation skills or prominence because of their role as a conceiver of the effort, but they have to use that power very carefully to bring disaparate people and opinions along in a collaborative way.  The existence or not of these skills, I think, are the often the determing factor on whether a networked activist effort like this one will succeed.
• Lots and lots of volunteer time dedicated to the project outside of the participants’ paid work and formal organizations;
• Participant generated ideas. For instance, Andy told me that the effort was originally concieved as a hard copy paper only and then one of the volunteers thought it should have a website that looks like the Times site — and he went off and did it;
• Some chaos. It is simply the nature of the beast that an all-volunteer networked effort, particularly one like this that takes a long time to plan and execute, will have moments of chaos and even disarray — and the leaders had better feel comfortable with this in order to be successful.  For this effort there was disagreement on the best ways to distribute the paper that had to, finally, be settled by Andy and his co-leader, Steve Lambert, as time simply ran out for further discussion.
• Resources.  Too often institutional philanthropy and nonprofits think of resources only in a financial sense.  This effort showcases the importance of leveraging social capital and activating social networks of people with particular technical skills in editing, web design and organization. They begged and borrowed for most everything else related to the project, but did have to raise about $70,000 in small amounts from friends to pay for the printing of 100,000 copies.
• Multiple channels.  This effort was organized by telephone, wiki, in-person meetings when possible, and text messaging.  Form always follows function for all efforts and the group picked up and used the tools that were most appropriate for what they needed at a particular moment in time.  For the Times spoof speed and stealth were required so Twitter and blogs were out.

Of course, people with their institutional hats on can participate in networked activist efforts like these, and all the better when they do and can bring institutional resources to bear as well.  It is a challenge for many institutions that need to take credit or “brand” something to participate.  In a time of scarce financial resources, however, it will behoove advocates to look at a model like this Times spoof and see what can be accomplished when a lot of people agree on a goal and can bring their own talents and those of their social networks to bear on a project.

Nice to Have the NY Times In Your Corner

The NY Times came to our rescue after Noah Shachtman impugned our good reputation at Twitter Vote Report by lumping our civil society use of Twitter on Election Day with the potential use of Twitter by terrorists.  The Times posted this update last night stating that the paragraphs that mentioned our efforts were expunged from the post.  Impugned and expunged in a matter of just a few hours!

Disaggregating the Feds

I was speaking with Matt Singer, an activist running Forward Montana, yesterday and he shared a great idea.  Matt wants Cabinet offices physically placed around the country to disaggregate the power concentrated in DC that creates inside-the-beltway groupthink.  Matt thinks the Department of Energy should be headquartered in Missoula, MT with Governor Schweitzer appointed the top dog. Cabinet meetings could be done by video conference, jobs would be created around the country, lobbyists would have to get up and move from DC.  All good stuff.

PS  I awoke this morning to find that again, ONCE AGAIN, the New York Times was ruminating around in my brain and published an op-ed by Mark Everson, the former head of the IRS, who is also in favor of federal government agency disaggregation.  In particular, he thought that moving the IRS to New Orleans would have been a wonderful job generator for the area in it’s greatest time of need.