A topic of discussion with the ABV team has been eco-systems. Simon first introduced us to the concept of eco-systems for communications. Simon defines it this way:
"All the options to communicate with your community."
Visually, such an eco-system might look like a blog in the middle, connected to a LinkedIn account, a Twitter account, radio, and speaking events. The blog is in the middle because its the primary way that the blogger communicates to her community. She also does radio interviews and keynote speeches and she Twitters. The question then becomes how parts of the eco-system affect one another.
I was intrigued when I heard that Barack Obama first announced his veep via a text message to, you guessed it, his community of supporters. So I went to his website and found that he’s got a pretty large eco-system, consisting of over a dozen social media tools, from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube to half a dozen social networking sites I had never heard of aimed at demographic groups. You can imagine how the red lights of a communications dashboard would have started flashing when Obama’s text message officially announced Joe Biden as the running mate. Or better yet, when the story was leaked to media the day before.
The Obama campaign’s focus on building a community, virtually, continues to fascinate me. The day that Biden was announced, the site had on the homepage a "Send a Welcome Note" button, with encouragement for stories about personal experiences as a constituent to the senator. They wasted no time in making sure that the existing community invited the newcomer into the fold. Isn’t that part of community-building?
I’m sure that avid Obama supporters have their own observations of how the Obama campaign creates a community feeling, even when the community numbers in the millions. Post your comments below on what you are seeing or feeling on this topic.
I like the term “ecosystem” as applied to social media online, especially as it relates to this year’s political race. The feeling that, as individuals, voters are powerless, insignificant, or helpless to promote change has plagued politics on a grass-roots level for quite a while. The recent presidential races spurred a great deal of enthusiasm, but beyond political rally cries, it was difficult for people to channel that enthusiasm, to maintain it, and to disseminate it.
Obama’s use of the various forms of social media both helped centralize his supporters, giving them a place to obtain the latest information and gather materials, but it also helped each supporter be a vital part of the process. As in an ecosystem where each entity has a vital role in sustaining the health of the overall system, marshaling the online networking media–and encouraging each supporter to do the same–helped each supporter become a part of that ecosystem: sustaining it, building it, and deriving from it.
In an odd way, I think the partisan nature of the US political system squashed the “community” feeling of the political process for a long time. I think–or maybe I hope–that the 2008 race is headlining a return to a more community-based and community-focused process. The implications for an online “hub” and ecosystem able to have that impact are tremendous: what if corporations started allowing their employees the same kind of ecosystem participation through similar social networking/media? How might corporate America radically change? Even on smaller scales, what if town organizations or parent school groups used a similar technique of disseminate information, encourage participation on whatever turf feels comfortable to the individual, and provide the means for doing so? Would we see a change in the way those groups functioned (or a change in the way people felt about them)?
Obama’s efforts through his ecosystem have been and continue to be fascinating to me, and inspiring with their potential for other arenas. I can’t wait to see what comes next from similar ecosystems.
I found the Obama fundraising machine particularly interesting when they did something called “Matching Funds” back in the primary season, which was essentially a way to bring you into the community, or ecosystem as it may be. Basically, when I donated [a meager] $25, it matched me up with another person randomly in the USA who also recently donated $25 to the campaign…had I donated $1200, it would have matched me up with someone else who had just donated $1200.
I was matched up with “Melissa” from Chicago, IL. I had the opportunity, as she did with me presumably, to email her and discuss whatever the latest topic was that I was itching to talk about with her – all “anonymously,” without needing to give Melissa my email address, as the message was sent to her via Obama’s website.
However, Obama’s fundraising machine used these messages, intelligently enough, by filtering key phrases to find out what specific people were discussing, in differing locations throughout the USA. Not only did they use that to target a more general and broad audience as they gathered this data, but they began microtargeting specific messages to specific people based on what obviously interested them. This not only helped them to find a wedge to ask for more funds – knowing what made me tick, since I was wanting to discuss it with Melissa, a total stranger – but also made it increasingly more likely that I would become more intrenched in their ecosystem (since they began sending me messages specifically about what I had discussed), and possibly go so far as to volunteer my time, in person, for the campaign.
And all through the concept of “Matching Funds.” Coming from the mind of a [somewhat seasoned] political campaigner: Genius.
Marissa–you raise some interesting questions as to how the same principles underlying Obama’s community-building efforts could be used by other groups with different missions. A great book on the role of social media in changing how groups are interacting is Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. Filled with lots of examples, Shirky makes the point that the cost of organizing people has gone down so much that what groups can undertake has changed. It’s a fascinating book. Shirky also has a number of essays on the impact of the Internet on culture, economics, media, and community at his site, http://www.shirky.com.
Alex–thanks for the inside glimpse into how Obama’s campaign is using marketing tools with social media to amp up the community-building. What you’ve described makes me think of a combination of Amazon’s book recommendations (other people who bought X also bought Y), the coupons that get spit out at grocery check out lanes based on what you bought, and a dating service. I agree that it’s pure genius.
And the extent to which organizations can now collect information on individuals is a bit scary. In this context of community-building, there seems to be a balancing act between having community members be self-selecting and giving lurkers a nudge.
@Carol: I just read (and now wish I had the url handy; I’ll post it if I find it again) an article about how few people who visit a page actually participate. Even among regular readers, people who consider the blog/site a “favorite” or a “daily must-read,” only about 1-2% of them comment on a regular basis. The rest are “lurkers.” It didn’t occur to me when reading Alex’s description that the “Matching Funds” technique was a way of nudging lurkers–but how true.
Still thinking of the ecosystem as a way of establishing, maintaining, harnessing and directing the energy and information potential of every individual user and the users as a group, encouraging interaction is a way of, as you put it, “amping up” the community and the user’s ownership of it. Once a “lurker” has posted a comment or interacted in some way with the site/blog, that individual is significantly more likely to do so again in the future. The first comment is the toughest to elicit from someone.
The idea of putting people together who may feel more comfortable “talking amongst themselves” (nod to Linda Richman) is such a stroke of subtle brilliance: on a site where the exposure is national, global even, interacting publicly is probably pretty intimidating to a lot of people. Interacting with someone else who seems to be “like me” so to speak, is far less scary. And once you’re comfortable with that, or once you’ve got some momentum built up in the conversations there, the ice has probably been broken enough that you might break out of that 98-99% lurker group and move into the 1-2% active participant group. Cool.
@Alex: You revealed through your comments another layer to the ecosystem structure that I hand’t stopped to ponder previously: some underlying momentum. For some users, commenting and interacting is natural–they have a self-momentum of enjoying the dialogue on a more public level (*raises hand*). But for others, some momentum from others is probably helpful; feeling like you’re in the company of some other kindred spirits or like-minded souls–or at least in the company of people who won’t laugh at your ideas!… that momentum probably needs to occur to shift the lurker into participant.
The more I learn about these ideas, and the more I think about them, and compare them to my own online experiences, the more fascinating they get, and the more I want to dig into them. All facts that I’m sure are completely un-obvious from the length of my comments. This is good stuff.