Blog: Social Networks

Flickr's Release of "Find Your Friends" Allows Organizations to Build their Network Faster and Be Smarter Communicators

Now it's easy to find and talk to "your friends" on Flickr. On March 31st Flickr opened up a new tool that allows people search their Yahoo!, Gmail, and Hotmail address books to find Flickr users with those email addresses. This really blows open the communications windows for organizations that host photos on Flickr and have large email lists of friends and supporters.

Organizations can now build relationships on Flickr with the same
people they send emails and e-newsletters to. This is a big step. I
have seen and helped a lot of nonprofits start using Flickr as a
community outreach tool, but aside from staking a presence and
regularly posting photos that are integrated with blog posts,
communication directors haven't really known what to do with the
service.

All they have to do to further connect with these people - and engage in a two way dialog with them - is to do a large address book import in to Google from their mail program and go to work. It's that easy with a CSV file dump (Comma Separated Values), which Google supports.

Flickr has a ton of great communications features - like commenting on photos, tagging, friending, etc - that organizations and supporters can now use to simply talk to each other. For many organizations, this may well be the very first time they get to see the faces of their supporters. 

This is a great way for organizations to embrace pull style communications (i.e. let supporters pull in their pictures rather than always pushing them out to them). Who knows, maybe organizations will start subscribing in mass to their supporters' feeds to see what they're posting and glean information about them this way. It will give them a very personal window into their membership base. I think this is where the real magic will happen. Maybe even just doing some lightweight automated text analysis based on tags will generate some great information and low lying fruit. 

UN Millennium Campaign Reaches Out to Facebook Community

Facebook became one of the most talked about social networks in the United States when they opened up their API this summer, and new Facebook applications have been popping up like crazy ever since. In addition to all the super poke and zombie applications, some interesting organizations and causes have entered the mix like the UN Millennium Campaign, who launched a Facebook application a couple weeks ago. (Disclaimer: They’re a client of ours and we recently built two websites for them, although we didn’t do any work on this application.)

This is how the application appears in my Facebook profile. As you can see, it’s a big old clock counting down to the campaign’s deadline to end global poverty. I picked this image because I think it’s powerful, but there are two other options you can choice from as well – a countdown clock to the next Stand Up Against Poverty event and a photo of the day, which is pictured below.

I particularly like the share button that’s on all of the profile widgets, which lets your friends add this application to their profile with just a click. This is a great feature to help spread the application virally, and one that I haven’t seen on too many other Facebook applications. Also there are links to the application’s main page and some of its main features, like blog, events, and friends hall of fame, which are good to get people interacting with the application.

Hot Tags and the Tags Related to Them

Think about the news you track and the issues you need to stay on top of on a daily basis. For me, one of those topics is social networking. There are often thousands of stories about social networking published every day with perhaps hundreds of different angles to them. Maybe somewhere in those thousands of stories and hundreds of angles is an emerging trend – major research on its impact on job hunting, a new technology or service that the blogosphere is drumming up, or the use of these networks by a new segment of the population. But how can I spot the trends in all that news?

Well, graphing the news can help. When you look at the incidence of a word in the news and can see the rise and fall of its use on a day-to-day basis, you can tell if a subject is gaining momentum in the media. However, seeing the rise and fall of a word’s incidence does nothing to help determine why it’s getting more or less attention. To figure that out you need more information. One way to do this is to look at words related to the hot topics in the media.

This graph shows the mentions of MySpace in the media from July 8 to July 30 (data from Trendio.com*). You can see that there is a slight spike toward the end of the chart and that mentions for MySpace peak at 164 on July 27. But why? 

Television was it in 1960, talk radio was it in 1992, and the internet was it in 2004. But what will be the breakout technology in this year’s election and in the 2008 presidential election? The internet will likely play an even bigger role but new technology will replace the communication and outreach tools that were deemed so revolutionary just a few years ago. A lot of people are betting that this new technology will be online social communities led by MySpace and YouTube.

Yesterday George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet hosted a discussion on politics, online social networks, and their connection. Everyone agreed that politicians – and nonprofits and advocacy groups – should be on these websites.

We just launched a 'photo petition' for Planed Parenthood's campaign against Target on their SaveROE.com site. Check out the pictures telling Target to stop denying medication to women. You can add your own picture telling Target to stop messing up here.

It is pretty cool, playing off other successful photo speak-out campaigns like FUH2 | Fuck You And Your H2 with the "Hummer H2 salute" of flipping off an H2, and the Sorry Everybody which documented the post 2004 election picture gallery of Americans
offering apologies to the world for George Bush's re-election.

As optimistic as I can get about online communities I am surprised by these numbers that I read on Bryght... of course in a good way... People are using online communities to help themselves, have fun and learn....

Of 1,007 respondents, 87% say they are part of a community. Of those, 66% say they participate in shared personal interest sites. Next comes hobby sites (62%), health community sites (55%), public issues sites (49%s), and commerce sites (47%). Others participate in social or business networking sites (42%), sports sites (42%), alumni sites (39%), or dating sites (23%).

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