Filed under: Advocacy, Avaaz, collaboration, Environment, Ethical Consumerism, Politics, Social Media | Tags: Activism, Advocacy, collaboration, digital, gaming, Politics, Social Media
Games designer Jane McGonigal gave a recent TED talk called gaming can make a better world. It’s slightly crazy, but very watchable. Apparently the average young American will spend 10,000 hours playing online games by age 21 – the same amount of time they spend in class.
She throws about some great concepts, such as “urgent optimism” (the dominant gaming state of mind) and “epic meaning” (the desire to be attached to something bigger) – all of which, she says, can be harnessed as a force for change.
It made me think it was about time to revisit the first post of this blog, about how social media and “digital” are making the world a better place.
1. Mass collaboration
It’s the coder’s maxim: “to enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” – in other words, anything can be fixed by a crowd. Dell’s IdeaStorm led the way on “open innovation”, and the same approach can be applied to social issues. For example, Slate magazine recently launched The Hive to tap the “collective intelligence” of its readers. Open Green Map and Project NOAH are other examples of crowdsourced projects.
2. Mass advocacy
People sometimes say that social media is self-absorbed, narcissistic – but social media can also be part of a powerful collective force. Recent examples include Fuck Cancer and the NoH8 anti-homophobia campaign – and thanks to the Twibbon, these things can spread fast. Avaaz.org is the biggest advocacy movement, with over 4.5 million users across the world.
3. Crowd funding
Ever since the Age Of Stupid film raised £450,000 from crowd-funding, it’s been the holy grail of social enterprise. Sites like Kickstarter and Pledge Bank connect ventures to micro-funding, and Go Fund Me works on a slightly bigger scale. We Pay helps organizations manage their funding, and White Label Crowd Funding – well, does what it says.
4. Asset Sharing
The web makes it possible to easily organize resource sharing – the result is initiatives such as LandShare and FreeCycle, and businesses such as ZipCar in the US and Street Car in the UK.
5. Consumer Power
Sites like Group On allow people to buy in bulk – collective buying power. Consumer power can be harnessed by activists – either negatively, such as Greenpeace’s Nestle campaign, or positively – what John Grant refers to as Joycotting, such as Greenpeace’s Green My Apple campaign.
6. Informed choices
Using the web to find the best deals is now part of mainstream life. There are also plenty of ethical comparison sites, such as EcoSwitch and Your Ethical Money in the UK, and Think 2010 in the US. Brand Karma tries to harness user feedback on brands, but none of these sites yet has a full social dimension. Maybe people want to think about planet and price together, not separately.
7. Taking the piss
There was much chat about how the recent election would be all about social media. It wasn’t, really – but social media did make a critical contribution: taking the piss. Satire by the people (maybe with a little help from the parties) – such as the brilliant My David Cameron, or the Cameron Anecdote Generator:
“Last week, I met a lesbian miner, who told me that left-wing extremists in the Labour Party was no substitute for a proper married relationship.”
“Last week, I met a young baker, who told me that anti-capitalists needed to get a proper job.”
“Last week, I met a disenfranchised gentleman, who told me that teenagers high on meow meow were stopping first-time buyers getting onto the property ladder.”
Well, he who laughs last, and all that…. So although social media wasn’t as decisive as people expected in the election, it’s probably changed the landscape for good. Last word to Alistair Campbell, talking to The Times:
“…public resistance to heavy messaging has grown, and for politics in particular there is no guarantee that the rewards of a well-funded, well-crafted and well-executed ad concept will outweigh the risks. The internet and, in particular, social networking have changed the terms of the relationship between the parties, the media and the public, taking at least some of the power to influence away from parties and media, to the benefit of the public.”
Filed under: Drugs, FRANK, Mother, Social Media, Uncategorized, Youth | Tags: cocaine, Drugs, FRANK, legal highs, mephedrone, Social Media, Youth
We’re now almost at 190,000 fans on Pablo’s Facebook page, part of the FRANK campaign. It’s become a real community, and since the beginning one of the main topics has been mephedrone – or meph, or MCAT, or cat piss, or bubble, or plant fertilizer, or whatever you want to call it.
Mephedrone has been in the news following two deaths this week. It’s currently one of a number of legal drugs, which has prompted a predictable furore (“The Death Drug We Can’t Police“, etc). Mandelson promised to look into it “very speedily” (perhaps not his finest choice of adverb).
We’ve been exploring communications around the “legal highs”, and developed the Crazy Chemist campaign (above), which ran in clubs last year. There are new chemicals being developed/synthesized/distributed all the time – it’s cat and mouse. We needed a proposition that can cover all of them. We found some crazy people out there pushing the envelope. This post from one of the mephedrone pioneers, a chemist calling himself Kinetic:
i’ve been bored over the last couple of days and had a few fun reagents lying around, so i thought i’d try and make some 1-(4-methylphenyl)-2-methylaminopropanone hydrochloride, or 4-methylmethcathinone. [...] I was a bit scared about what snorting 50mg might do, but since I’ve been almost constantly abusing the (badly synthesised) 1-phenyl-2-methylaminobutan-1-one, 50mg didn’t do too much. I thought I’d wasted my time until I snorted another 100mg about 30 minutes later, and then it hit me. Intense rushes all over, lasting for well over 30 minutes.
That was in 2004. Legal highs like mephedrone find their way into the clubs, and then out into the mainstream. In 2008, mephedrone didn’t even have a Wikipedia page – now it’s easily to order online. A Google trends search shows the steady growth of interest in mephedrone over the last 12 months:
We did some qualitative work with users, and found the growth of legal highs is part of a bigger picture: “escapism is back”, as our researcher Steve Lacey puts it. Drug use is always part of a bigger drug culture, and Steve thinks that an impulse to get “out of it” is a growing response to the recession. Platform magazine agrees:
Down with shiny women, washing and cocaine, up with bad tattoos and stealing tranquilizers from pony club. Economy drug experimentation is reaching a new socially acceptable high.
Maybe this is why the current national panic over mephedrone isn’t focused on the cities, but in deprived rural areas, as reported in the latest Druglink. For example, in Teesdale, mephedrone use was triggered by a police crackdown on local cocaine dealers, as sgt Michael Urwin explains:
From what we can gather, it started from one lad in Cockfield watching a BBC3 documentary about legal highs. He’s gone on the internet and bought some mephedrone. Then he bought in bulk, sold to his mates in the village and from there it traveled to the neighbouring village of Evenwood, then onto the towns of Barnard Castle, Bishop Auckland and eventually Darlington. I think it’s a case of an enterprising, if that’s the right word, teenager who thought ‘how can I get round this lack of cocaine’.
So, it’s the BBC’s fault. This is the risk that communications face: talk to much about it and you stimulate demand. That’s why Crazy Chemist was targeting clubs environments. But we may be seeing a perfect storm of drug use: a growing desire for escapism; cheap and easy access online; police are turning the screws on cocaine and ecstasy supply, and prices are rising. Banning mephedrone may (or may not) solve the government’s mephedrone problem, but you can bet the next batch of legal highs are ready and waiting.
Our Facebook page for Pablo the Drug Mule Dog now has over 135,000 fans – and it’s still growing. It’s an extension of the TV campaign, which shows Pablo’s journey through the darker side of cocaine use. Our Facebook page simply continues this journey. Pablo meets all sorts of people involved in the world of coke: a DJ, a bouncer, a doctor, the mother of an addict, etc – asking them all, “what’s the big deal about coke?”.
It’s been great to watch a community form around this page – here’s what we’ve learnt so far:
1. IT’S PLAY
We’ve created a safe environment where kids feel OK to discuss drugs and ask stupid questions without risk of embarrassment.
2. IT’S COMMUNITY
It’s been funny and sometimes quite moving to read some of the stories people are sharing, and their response to each other – eager to offer advice and encouragement.
3. IT’S SELF-REGULATING
At first we had a lot of “drugs are cool and should be legal’ comments. We resisted moderating these, and it’s been great to watch the community become self-moderating.
4. IT’S CONVERSATION
Pablo’s quest provide a good story, and the films are like an “alibi” for being on Facebook – but the main draw for kids is the social, not content – it’s all about conversation: with Pablo, with each other. Pablo keeps the conversation going.
FRANK is the most trusted source of drugs information for young people – more than your teachers, your mum, or even your friends. But FRANK was invented in 2003, and the world kids live in has changed just a bit since then. We’re learning loads from this activity about how to keep building trust with kids in the world they live in now.
Filed under: Activism, Advocacy, Amnesty International, collaboration, Social Media | Tags: Activism, Advocacy, amnesty, collaboration, Social Media
It’s been interesting working with Amnesty on their digital strategy. Obviously any campaigning organization needs to really understand how activism, social media and participation all fit together – so we had a look at various models. They’re all suspiciously linear (lots of ladders) but interesting starting points.
First up is Monte Lutz from Edelman who wrote Barrack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit, which describes the strategy in terms of an Advocacy Ladder:
Then we have the Social Technographics Ladder from Forrester – I’ve seen this in three or four presentations in the last few weeks, and Forrester have done some work to quantify the “rungs”:
“Social Architect” Amy Jo Kim went back to basics and did a version of Maslow for social networks (maybe interesting for Martha Lane Fox and her Digital Inclusion Task Force):
Then back to the 1960s: social scientist Sherry Arnstein developed a Ladder of Citizen Partipation which looks at political engagement (I think we currently swerve between “citizen control” and “therapy”):
Much more recently, Mark Earls blog has a post called The big picture of social stuff which links to an interesting paper he’s pulled together on how social media changes the map.
