From March 11 through 15, genConnect.com was on-site in downtown Austin, TX conducting personal interviews with speakers slated to appear at SXSWi. I was honored to be interviewed among a wonderful list of other interviewees, including Tim Draper, Valeria Maltoni, Elisa Camahort Page, Craig Newmark, Laura Fitton, Aaron Strout, Guy Kawasaki, Rick Murray, Tim O’Reilly, Liz Strauss, and many many more.
Check out more great videos over at genConnect.
I’ve submitted a panel for SXSW, and if you like the topic (and only if you like it, as I don’t support having a popularity contest about it, as it does no one any good!), please consider giving us a vote!
Description
We’ve been asking the same questions about digital activism for years now: Does digital technology give activists or repressive governments an advantage? Are these technologies actually changing the dynamics of political or social power or is it just hype? We’ve got cyber-utopians and cyber-pessimists, but are both overstating their cases? We’ve dissected siloed cases of digital activism to death – the Iranian Revolution, the No Mas FARC Facebook page – but have we developed any long-lasting frameworks? But it doesn’t seem like we’re getting any closer to the answers. What do we really know about digital activism anyway?? The reason we aren’t closer to answering these questions is that we’re stuck in lazy discourse and un-winnable ping-pong debates based on sets of contradictory narratives and messy comparisons across different contexts. We lack a standard for analysis, leaving us in a free-for-all where legitimacy is based mostly on the boldness of claims and the catchiness of neologisms. The goal of this panel is to move the discussion of digital activism in a direction that supports development of foundational knowledge… and eventually a bonified field of discourse and study. We’ll spend some time constructively dissecting the current problems in how digital activism is discussed and debated and get right to the meat of what we really SHOULD be talking about in order to identify concrete ways to move the field forward.
Questions Answered
You can vote here, and please pass it along to anyone you think may enjoy the topic!
Panelists:
Sam Fleming @samflemming
Benjamin Joffe @benjaminjoffe
Jacqui Zhou @jacquizhou
Description:
Most Westerners learn about China’s social media through traditional media whose coverage tends to focus on conflicts and politics. But that’s not the whole story. We will explore the motivation behind massive adoption of social media, reasons behind local brands’ domination of the market and social media’s impact on business and…
Discussion:
The landscape is very complicated.
Flemming: Everything that’s happening in the West is happening in China.
Different platforms have different services. The Bulletin Board Sservice (BBS) is the heart of social media in China. They are very popular, they’re anonymous and people talk about just about everything here. There are 117 million BBS users in China. Blogs are used for personal purposes, the “About Me” narrative. Social Networking Services (SNS) are also quite widely used.
As a brand, it’s essential to measure and track how people are talking about your brand.
What are they doing online? Online video and instant messaging (IM) is huge, eCommerce is taking off, online gaming and music is big.
China social media dominates the US: Chinese netizens are more engaged in creating/sharing content. 40% of users in China are creators, compared to 21% of Americans.
Netnovels are popular, published online, people will read it, and the ones that get the most attention are actually published.
Joffe: People not only use social networks, but they use several of them at a time, depending on who they’re talking to, what they’re trying to do, etc.
People have multiple identities, and often multiple identities on a single platform.
China isn’t learning just from the US, they’re learning from several places, such as Korea (for online video mostly). The local market hasn’t developed very strongly for online advertising, so most of those services don’t rely on advertising.
China’s virtual goods market was about $5B in 2009!
Tencent is one of the most important network in China, it’s the third largest internet company in the world, 90% of the revenue is from digital goods (35% of which is from games) and 10% is from ads. They’re net margin is 40%!
5Cs of Chinese Innoviation: Copy, Combination (put two or more existing products/services together into something more), Competition (fostering innovation), Constraints (another source of innovation, they had to find new concepts), China.Panel: How to Spark a Movement in the 21st Century
Speaker: Scott Heiferman
Description: Technology connects us to each other as never before, making it easier to harness our collective power. Obama’s election and post-election Iran barely scratch the surface of what’s possible when people self-organize. Hear how to embrace this potential, and what it means for our future.
Usual movement call-to-action on web: Watch us, See us, Download us, Join us, Friend us, Follow us, Contact us, Visit us….. what about g
iving them something to do? What about connecting them to each other? This ends up being a false sense of membership.
Remember: Numbers of followers mean nothing. Fans and followers are not a movement, get them to self-organize, mobilize, act. Distribute responsibility, not just info or tasks.
We’re all organizers now. Watch what happens after they connect and share stories.
“Let’s” is a word used a lot on these networks. One of the keys is to be everywhere.
Portrait of a great movement:
“Heart of a movement is that they have universal distribution, local presence everywhere, is infinitely expandable, provides person care and contact, is a leadership factory, turns spectators into participators, consumers into contributors and an audience into an army.”
You must make followers powerful.
Step 1: Get followers & Fans around the mission
Step 2: Get them interacting online, globally
Step 3: Get them to meet up locally everywhere
