Come on in. The water's fine.

The Future of Nonprofit Media and the Role of Social Networks

An interesting story in the Sunday New York Times on Mother Jones magazine, and the lessons it holds for media outlets who might hope to survive as a nonprofits. According to reporter Tim Arango: "Mother Jones’s example shows, nonprofit publications, while they may initially be more durable in a down economy, are far from impervious to market forces."  Another enduring nonprofit media outlet is Grist.org, which has managed to thrive for over a decade on an NPR-style funding diet of foundation grants, ad sales, contributions from loyal readers.  

Grist and Mother Jones may be exceptions to the rules of today's changing journalism landscape. As the old print media paradigm collapses, both Grist and MJ are moving quickly to employ new technologies that will make their content more video-based, blog-friendly, sticky and Web 2.0-friendly. They have no choice, after all, in this age of media Darwinism, where, according to Nielsen, the number of hours we spend social networking has now eclipsed the time we spend on email.  

Some media outlets will no doubt go quietly into the night (see the Rocky Mountain News' recent collapse or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's eminent demise). Others will, of course, adapt and live to see another day. What the recipe for long term success ultimately includes is anyone's guess.

A Completely Unscientific (Yet Accurate) Look At Social Networking Sites

Pretty funny, and on target, "report" from a rather enigmatic site called Brainz.org. My favorite "data point" -- 71% of Linked In's users are people who never use Linked In. Sometimes you just have to laugh.

The Technology Is Not Hard. The Social Change Is Hard.

Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, co-authors of Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies spoke at the fundraising lunch for NPower Seattle today. They focused on how to be strategic, and on understanding how communication has irrevocably changed.

A favorite quip, for the biggest laugh: Getting stuff off of the Internet is like getting the pee out of the swimming pool.

They concentrated on nonprofit examples, of course, given their audience. I noticed there were quite a few healthcare examples, which makes me wonder once again if in the philanthropy and nonprofit world some fields and causes lend themselves to social media more than others. I didn't catch that any of their examples had obvious foundation involvement (which was not going to be their focus, but it sure would've been interesting to see if a foundation came up).

I thought Li's summation at the end was very strong. She said the technologies are not hard. The social change is hard. The way it changes us is hard. And letting go of the fallacy of control is hard.

She recommended a big bottle of Rolaids on your desk, and diving in.

McKinsey and Web 2.0: Beginning At Home

The McKinsey Quarterly published "Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work" this week. The article is based on studying companies, "more than 50 early adopters" over the last two years. The focus is on internal adoption and use of participatory technologies, which is a welcome emphasis. "Social media" is not an outreach program or communications project that can be applied independently of internal participation and transparency. When organizations try this, weird things happen. Once again, change begins at home. Internal participation needs to happen in order for an organization to effectively engage external audiences online.

One of the things that became clear in our research of foundations' use of Web 2.0 is that foundations often didn't know how many of their own staff (and, for that matter, grantees) were already participating in social media. The McKinsey article references Clay Shirky's (author of Here Comes Everybody) notion of "cognitive surplus." Do you know what "cognitive surplus" there might be at your foundation or nonprofit? What steps are you taking to tap that wisdom?

Safe Socializing

Do you really have to tell your CEO or ED not to share sensitive information or off-color jokes on Twitter or Facebook? Many of the philanthropy communications professionals we speak to would love to have the "problem" of an overly enthusiastic executive when it comes to social media. But as more and more people are participating in social networks (emarketer says today that there were 82.5 million "content creators" in 2008), we're all re-learning the boundaries between the professional and personal as we "show up" online to friends, family, co-workers, partners...everyone.

Lidija Davis writes about the "unforeseen consequences" of social media, including the now well-traveled example of an executive (advertising, no less) who posted an unflattering Tweet about his client's city upon arrival, and got called out on it. Multiple aliases won't work (though the occassional psuedonym can be fun). Authenticity and transparency are critical to a credible online presence. There are some basic steps you can take with privacy settings and common sense. My rule: I assume anything I post can be can ultimately be seen by anyone. Even if I am using a pseudonym. 

UPDATE: Great post today from Allison Fine, "Who are you?". Money quote: "The onus isn’t on us, the user, to figure out who you are. The responsibility lies with you to explain who you are and what you’re doing."

 

What's a journalist to do?

 A rivalry in my neighborhood about the role of journalism has spilled onto the blogosphere. Our local weekly, The West Seattle Herald, published an editorial asserting itself in the face of our local news site, the West Seattle Blog.

The Herald argues that 300 words from a professional journalist are better than 3,000 from a blogger (ignoring the WSB editor's background in "traditional" media). OK, there are oodles of posts and comments on WSB, which adds up to a lot of words, but you know what? It's easy to choose what I’m interested in, and I can analyze and draw conclusions myself from this material better than I could from the Herald’s 300 word columns. Published a week later.

This micro-local skirmish is an example of what journalism is struggling with — how to add value when the news cycle has reached a vanishing point and readers in a “Web 2.0″ world expect greater aggregation of information and are less dependent on a professional mediator between them and the information (we're a long, long way from Cronkite's days). What the Herald is missing is that WSB is a terrific aggregator of news and information, using techniques that include everything from old-fashioned working a beat to liveblogging and Twitter.

We subscribed to the Herald for years, but let it lapse when WSB hit its stride. Reading WSB I am far better informed about my neighborhood than I ever was reading the dailies and the Herald. For one thing, WSB covers local nonprofits and their activities far more than the dailies or Herald could, including projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  Part of adapting to a Web 2.0 world is adjusting your listening; attuning our ears to a new conversation. Foundations and their grantees should pay attention to neighborhood blogs because they may be more likely to cover the local initiatives that foundations fund than print media.

Meantime, the folks at the Herald have their work cut out for them. Their editorial attracted more attention for WSB, and they have to deal with an Italian prosecutor suing them for defamation for their coverage of the Amanda Knox story. Sounds like it's been a tough week.

UPDATE 2/15: For a national perspective on this topic, and a vision of how good reporting can exist side-by-side print and Web, this must read at the NY Times today. Hat tip Bruce Trachtenberg via Twitter.

Cool Kid? Or Dinosaur?

There's a thoughtful exchange over at Tactical Philanthropy between Sean Stannard-Stockton and Renata Rafferty. (Permalinks for the conversation here, here, and here.) Renata talks about "dinosaur philanthropists" who are "well-intentioned, kind, caring, wealthy people who are so generous with their giving" but aren't into "the Chronicle, CoF, SVPs, blogs, tweets, web-based forums, etc. centering on philanthropy," compared to the "cool kids" on the cutting edge. She speculates about how long it's going to be before "changemakers" overtake the generations of "dinosaur" philanthropy.

What do you think. Is your donor/board/foundation part of the "dinosaurs" or the "cool kids"?

Transparency: Love it, hate it.

Lately we're seeing some interesting consequences of the increased transparency the Web makes possible, and increased debate over what is and isn't appropriate in the name of transparency.

techPresident sums up the Twitter adventures of a few politicians, including the possibility that the Virginia Senate Republicans lost an opportunity to take control of their chamber due to a premature Tweet from their party chair.

The controversial site www.eightmaps.com, a mashup of donors to California's Proposition 8 and Google Maps, is prompting debate about campaign-finance disclosure laws and the ethics of using that information.

And there is an increased focus on what transparency -- and limits -- should be required when public money is used to intervene in the economic crisis, a debate that is likely to continue, heat up, and include philanthropy and nonprofits, especially in the wake of the Madoff scandal.

It's tempting to stay below the fray and let others make the mistakes first. Foundations are, arguably, under less pressure from customers, donors, and taxpayers than for-profits, nonprofits, and politicians are to disclose and interact online. But why not get ahead of the curve? The expectation for financial transparency is only going to increase through this recession. As Bruce Trachtenberg said in a recent post on financial transparency over at the Communications Network blog, "Make your CFO your best friend." Getting started can be as easy as posting financials and grants on your Web site.

Just be careful what you Tweet.

And You Worry About Controlling The Message...

Guest Post from Bruce Trachtenberg, executive director, The Communications Network.

In our report on Web 2.0 and how foundations should be using the new technology to bolster their communications, one of the most interesting findings we discussed was the fear some foundations have of losing control of the message.  When it comes to losing control, apparently foundations aren't the only ones struggling with that issue in today's topsy turvy times.

In his column this past weekend in the New York Times, Public Editor Clark Hoyt wrote about how the newspaper experienced for itself a "great fear in newsrooms, including The Times's: that the Internet, with its emphasis on minute-to-minute competition, is undermining the values of the print culture."  Specifically, Hoyt discusses the substantial differences in how the Times' online and print editions each covered a smear campaign orchestrated by the state Governor's office after Caroline Kennedy withdrew her name as a candidate to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate.

Hoyt writes that the print version of the story was "a smart, useful revelation about New York hardball politics and the credibility of the state's governor." In contrast, the online version of the story was a rolling report -- updated throughout the day and containing unsubstantiated leaks and claims damaging to Kennedy.  Notes Hoyt, "This is where the print newspaper and the digital newspaper are colliding. The traditional once-a-day cycle allows more time for reporting and thoughtful discussion about how a story should be framed. What happened in this case is that normal news reporting, in which a story changes in content, tone and emphasis as more is learned, played out in front of the whole world, instead of in the newsroom before publication. In the process, Kennedy took an unfair hit."

Now we know what Alice must have seen when she saw the world through the Looking Glass.

Social Networks, Fundraising and Issue Fatigue

In a new post called "Avoiding the Sirens Song of Social Media Fundraising," blogger and author Hildy Gotlieb offers an interesting exploration about why using Social Media to raise funds may be a fool's errand for many organizations. According to Gotlieb, the lure of asking for donations on Twitter or Facebook or sites such as Kiva.org is: (a) not sustainable; (b) scarcity-based rather than strength-based and (c) counterproductive if we want to create a better future for our communities.

The fundraising question, which may worry donation-dependent non profits more than endowed Foundations, actually maps to a bigger concern around "Issue Fatigue." It's a new thread on Social Edge and a topic that funders, and all organizations interested in changing public will, should be paying close attention to. But are they?