Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Social Activity Feeds and Laptop Stickers

Photo from Ian Kennedy

I love laptop stickers! 

I met Ian Kennedy who is the product manager at MyBlogLog, a blogger social network.  Here's a summary of his talk at GSP and video.   MyBlogLog recently implemented a new feature called "activity streams." An activity stream is a feed of recent activities by your blog friends on various social networks - blog posts, new photos, bookmarks on Delicious, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc.   

Ian spoke on a panel called Social Networks and the Need for Feeds at Graphing Social Patterns. Feeds help you keep track of what you friends/family are doing and can also be used a social filter for new content discovery.  There are privacy issues - the middle ground between all private, and all public.

What caught my attention was how this might change peer knowledge sharing in a group context.  A point was made that when focused discussions happen within your group of friends based on a feed item - the conversation can be higher quality than wide open commenting.

Diagram in Flickr

I am thinking about the NpTech Tag Stream and the use of a meta feed - (combing feeds of sources of nptech tagged items by specific or know group of people in a particular field).   How does it change is you look at as 'social feeds."  How useful and manageable is the knowledge sharing.  It was mentioned that filtering would be an issues - for example - for nptech stuff - I might only want to follow colleagues blog posts, bookmarks - not everything.   

Just some more to ponder ..

Gina Trapani - Upgrade Your Life - New Edition!

Flickr Photo

Last July, I took this photo of the three geek girls at BlogHer.   She used the idea for this great photo!  So, just got a copy of her newly updated book Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better for the plane ride back  tto Boston

Graphing Social Patterns: Add the Words "with your friends"

In yesterday's keynote, Charlene Li's key point was in the future, 'social networks will be like air.' In other words, it won't get in your way as you navigate across the web and it will feel inadequate (like you can't breathe) if your friends or social network or "social graph" isn't part of your everyday web experience.   (Her slides are here and Read/Write Web: Coverage of Charlene Li's Keynote and Nick O'Neil/All Facebook here)

The fortune cookie visual came from Google's David Glazer's presentation on Google Open Social.  This was a very useful introduction in non-technical terms.   Glazer talked about the "computing cloud" - which is happens when a technology is no longer new, when there is a critical mass of adopters.  The technology disappears and people focus on productivity.   He said the "social cloud" is about getting the problems out of the way so people can connect. 

He asks where it is helpful to be social?  He used the Fortune cookie came add "with your friends."   So, I wonder what type of activity by your organization's constituents would you add the phrase, "with your friends."  This is how you might be envisioning your the future for your organization's social web presence and wrap your brains around Open Social.   Glazer says we aren't there yet - fragmentation is an issue: authentication, OpenID, never-ending friending, and applications.  (Notes from DigitalPodcast and analysis/notes from Jeremiah Owyang.

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Chris Messina's presentation.  Take some time to flip through it and think about it.

The session about "Driving Fanatic User Engagement and Addictive Retention" was a fascinating overview of game apps on Facebook - the communities, metrics, and how they drive engagement.   I asked if there were apps on Facebook that might fall in the category of games for change?    Seems like this might be a niche opportunity for some nonprofits and perhaps an interesting panel or discussion at Games for Change.  See also the panel notes on making money with social games platform.

A cool app created with the Flickr API that is twitter on flickr.  Let's you see in real time photos tagged with the same tag.  Very cool.  PhotoPhlow

Other conference coverage

Benjamin Ling/Facebook - from Nick O'Neill - All Facebook
MySpace Developer's Platform - from Jeremiah Owyang

Digital Podcast has complete and very good notes on all sessions

gspwest08

Graphing Social Patterns: Morning Notes, My Slides, Etc

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I'm here in San Diego at Graphing Social Patterns and I was the last speaker on the morning agenda.  I gave a talk about Personal Socially Networked Fundraising, sharing some learnings and the story from the recent America's Giving Challenge.  I put the presentation on a wiki with my presentation notes and some additional references.

I think the delivery went okay (or rocked!) I was most worried about whether some of this was relevant to a business audience and it looks like it was. I got nervous when the audio faded out, but the techs handed me a hand mic and I made a mistake of fipping slides backwards in a dramatic moment.   But otherwise, pretty pleased and now can actually to pay attention to the rest of the conference.

I would have liked more time and space between the reflection, building the presentation, and practicing the delivery.   I did all that in five days.  I didn't spend enough time on the tactical part of flipping the slides.   Special thanks to Laura Fitton (Pistachio) for MyOoVoo talk and the tips she shared.  It was a lifesaver!  I also did a mind map which mapped out tone/style changes - not just the single phrase - trying to remember not to be too much rally style and more of the sincerity.

Still have some questions to take into future learning - mostly about metrics. 

• How to avoid donor fatigue?
• How to easily and more automatically gather quantitative metrics?
• How to continue to deepen relationships as it grows? Scaling?
• What is the art and science of Network Weaving?
• How does 3Rs map to the various tools or stages of engagement?
• How to do a diagram of the ladder of engagement but more with circles or three-D?
• How to better integrate with traditional fundraising strategies?
• What does the flow of networked donations look like?  Is there some way to run analysis so you can determine who influenced the most contributions?

Digital Podcast has some notes here.

Charlene Li gave a presentation on the future of social networks.   I took some notes, but I will post a link to the slides later.  The key phrase takeaway - that social networks will be like air.  That's the future of the web.  She  broke down the components, talked about the challenges, etc.  There were two visuals of social graphs that were very useful - a 3d one.   Here's blog post by Dan Farber at CNET summarizing the key points.

There was a presentation from the Facebook Apps from Stanford right before my presentation and it was really good, but didn't take notes.  Jeremiah Owyang has notes here.

Update:  Here's Charlene Li's slides and Here's the coverage from Read/Write web.