ImpactWatch Blog

On June 29th and 30th the ImpactWatch team and The Bivings Group had the pleasure of attending the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York City. One of the tools that we built for the conference was a Twitter aggregator called Twitterslurp so that everybody could keep track of the tweets about the conference on one web page.

Dave Witzel over at the Personal Democracy Forum has a great post up analyzing all of the data Twitterslurp collected to determine which people and topics got the most buzz on Twitter during the conference. These are the top five:

• danah boyd
• Micah Sifry
• Mark Pesce
• Andrew Rasiej
• Michael Wesch

Media monitoring and analysis is what we do over here at ImpactWatch, so we decided to see how online News and Blogs stacked up against the Twitter results. They tell somewhat of a different story.

Speakers

Looking at News and Blogs published between June 29th and July 8th the clear standouts were White House CIO Vivek Kundra and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Online News 6/29 – 7/9

Kundra’s announcement about usaspending.gov, an online “IT Dashboard” where citizens can go to look up how the government is spending their tax dollars on Information Technology was reported in over 54% of main stream news sites online. Bloomberg also announced five NYC government information technology initiatives including the NYC Big Apps contest asking developers to find creative ways to mash-up New York City’s data feeds so information could be better shared with the public. He garnered 17.3% of the media attention as a result.

Blogs 6/29-7/9

Comparatively, in blog posts, Kundra and Bloomberg again dominated the coverage with a combined 55% share from bloggers. The overall results, however, were closer to the trends that Dave Witzel found in Twitter. danah boyd and her presentation on class differences on Facebook and Myspace was the third most written about in 25 different blog posts. Anthropologist Michael Wesch’s session on the evolution of the phrase “whatever” managed to make a top five appearance with 19 blog posts, a tie with PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej.

Themes

The overall topics again reflected the “Gov 2.0” initiatives by Kundra and Bloomberg, earning 53.9% of the total coverage. Other top trending topics were health care, being driven by Obama’s health care initiatives and the call for an open data format for health care data. Iran was still on a lot of people’s minds as a result of the recent elections. Again, danah boyd’s discussion of classes in social networks received a lot of press. Rounding out the top five themes was the debate over whether or not Broadband is a civil right.

Shift to Real-Time information

The following two graphs represent the volume from June 25th and the days leading up to the conference, to July 9th, nine days after the conference ended. If we take a look at the total volume of Tweets, News, and Blogs, the spikes look pretty similar, but there are two big differences that stand out.

The most obvious difference is the volume. 19324 total tweets versus 91 News articles and 194 blog posts during the same time frame. Twitter has clearly become the communication method of choice, at least at technically oriented conferences like PDF.

The other noticeable difference is when the spikes in volume occurred. The peak day for News with 41 articles and Blogs with 61 posts was the second day of the conference reflecting the coverage of the previous day’s events. Twitter however peaks on the first day of the conference with 9615 tweets and is almost as high on the second day with 7959. The audience’s value of the real-time nature of Twitter conversations is clearly evident.

Twitter Volume

Personal Democracy Forum Session: Building The Social Economy: Craigbucks, Newmarks, and Making Whuffie
Panelists: Tara Hunt and Doughlas Rushkoff

Who are they?*

Douglas Rushkoff is an author and though-leader. His most recent book is Life Inc. He is best known as the originator of the terms media virus, social currency, and digital natives, as well as for applying open source principles to government, religion, and economics.

Tara Hunt is the author of The Whuffie Factor which focuses on the importance of social capital in B2C relationships and pinpoints the rise of online communities as the force that makes social capital unavoidable for businesses going forward. Her next book discusses the the psychology and economics of happiness as the basis of your successful business model.

What are they talking about?

The basic premise is that there is a social economy that exists alongside our currency-based economy. Each person has (or lacks) social currency in the same sense that people have (or don’t have) paper currency.

Tara Hunt, one of the speakers, refers (rather incessantly) to social currency or capital as “whuffie.”

What makes a social economy?

As explained by the speakers, a social economy is the exchange of goods and services among individuals, rather than between individuals and corporations.

Doug calls this “reclaiming commerce as a human activity” and points out that commercial does not mean corporate. He described the rise of the corporation as a system of exploitation and gives the social economy as an alternative to outsourcing trade to corporations and banks.

What is social capital?

It was kind of hard to pluck a definition from the session, but you could think of it as your worth to others in non-dollar terms. It’s what you have to offer to the community – your expertise and participation.

Some rules of social capital from Tara:

- The inability to save social capital encourages reinvestment.
- The value of social capital increases as it circulates.
- The law of suckage says that social capital will attract the sucky [plagarizing] element that tries to monetize and detract from the quality of the original contribution to the social economy.

Doug adds that in order to create social capital you must contribute first-hand to the social economy. For example, franchises do not add original value and therefore have no, um, whuffie.

How do I know how much social capital I have?

You don’t. According to Tara, the “good thing” about whuffie is that it means something different to everyone. So, you can’t measure whuffie. You can’t compare it. You can’t cheat it. Don’t even try inflating your whuffie. It won’t work (unless you’re a talentless celeb with a great PR team).

How do I increase my social capital?

I’m not really clear on this. I think we all understand the concept of being valuable to the community by being willing and able to contribute time and talent. And that value is qualitatively perceived by the community.

But both speakers agree that “personal branding” – defining yourself by your professional expertise – is “an oxymoron” because individuals are not corporations and should not impersonate them.

It would seem natural that to increase your social capital, you would increase your talent then let the community know so that they can take advantage of (and revalue) your contributions. If you’re not able to brand yourself according to your niche or expertise, or to promote your talents, I’m not sure how social valuations change.

The necessity to discover each and every other economy member’s value organically seems extremely inefficient. I think this would create an obstacle to the replacement of the currency-based economy with a social one, which seems to be the ultimate objective of the panelists.

How can I be successful in the social economy?

Tara gave some tips for interacting in the social economy which can be applied to your online customer engagement.

1. Turn the bullhorn around: Stop talking and start listening to your stakeholders.
2. Be part of the community you serve: Be a member of social platforms before conducting commerce there.
3. Create amazing customer experiences: Look for feedback and build ongoing relationships.
4. Embrace the chaos: You can’t control (or measure) the social economy.
5. Find your higher purpose: You get back what you give.

*Bios stolen from the PDF conference website.

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Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Brymo.