A twitter campaign is one of the most effective viral marketing tools available; getting a trending topic can be the easiest and quickest way to get a message seen by millions of users. With that in mind, I wanted to run a simple experiment to see what the process of establishing and executing a viral twitter campaign was like. Though the campaign wasn’t nearly as successful as I would have liked, my methodology and results taught me a few interesting things about the makeup of viral-ity on twitter that are good to know moving forward when trying to promote campaigns for social causes.

Here’s what I did:

Step 1- picked a cause or topic to get people to support. As a big basketball fan and someone who interacts with members of the Lakers community on Twitter, I figured the current topic of Lamar Odom’s contract extension (a cause of much chagrin and angst among laker fans) would be an interesting subject. Could I get people to rally around the idea of swaying @TheRealLamarOdom to stay with the Lakers through sheer force of numbers on Twitter?

Step 2- created a content site that would ostensibly serve as the campaign hub. It took me about 15 minutes to create a simple Tumblr with some videos, relevant links to recent articles, and a Twitter widget pulling in posts about Odom. My intent was to promote the hashtag #keeplamar, and pull in those posts as a feed, but till that point I used “Lamar Odom” as the search term. Looking back, this might have been my key mistake— using a site that basically aggregates content as the “hub” of the campaign. Perhaps I would have better been served making my own content, or maybe even sticking to tweets as the primary message medium.

Choosing as I did, I went with bit.ly to shorten my link. It’s an amazing tracking tool, and as feeble as my stats were, this screenshot gives you a good idea of the power it has in tracking links and trends by the minute.

Step 3- sent out a few tweets promoting the hashtag, making sure to interact with popular community members. I only have about 280 followers, which I’m assuming is a grab-bag mix of technology enthusiasts, basketball fans, and people I know in real life (mostly students). As a result, the success of my campaign hinged on connecting with influential twitterers in my field and getting them to rally support among their followers. I utterly failed in this step. My efforts to contact 2 of the more influential community members were as follows-

- One of them is the ‘unofficial’ Lakers twitter account with more than 20,000 followers. A DM to promote the movement was met with a negative reply saying he didn’t want to get involved.

- The other is a Lakers blogger with X followers, interacting with many Lakers fans as well. Similarly, he didn’t want to support the campaign, simply because he thought it was pointless- reports seemed to indicate that a resolution was immediately impending. Of course, even a week later, the situation was still ongoing with tons of speculation, but no substantive action from the public- just content to wait for the results of the ongoing private negotiations. This is an important point discussed later.

Due to the makeup of my follower group, failing to garner support from these individuals meant that my campaign simply didn’t have legs. I got a few feeble retweets from some friends on twitter, but that’s about it- no mention of the hashtag outside of my immediate follower network, let alone a mass movement.

Thoughts/Obstacles

• One of the biggest hurdles to overcome is simple inertia- the lack of action, not due to apathy, but because people simply feel that they won’t make a difference to the outcome. as social media progressively spreads in reach and influence, I think this problem will diminish as more individuals see real examples of their voices being heard. Efforts like Lend me some sugar, that aim to influence corporations’ purchasing decisions by consumer voting, will help in this regard. [While my cause was obviously not that important, making apathy from the general public understandable, I was hoping to at least generate support among Lakers fans, who regard Odom as one of their favorite players.]
• Reaching outside of your immediate network. As I found out, it’s difficult to amplify your voice when you don’t have a huge first degree network. I imagine it’s tough for individuals to do this unless they have a very focused theme to their twitter stream, serving as a voice for an entire community of people passionate about a specific topic. If that’s not feasible, it’s key to engage individuals who fit this profile to promote your cause.
• Making your cause understandable and easy to participate in. In retrospect, I might have been better served focusing my efforts on marketing my message, making it more engaging for people to participate in. It’s important to align your interests with those of the individuals you’re hoping to garner support from; give them a chance to show how funny/smart/caustically witty they are while at the same time voicing support for something they care about.

What’s the Point?

So why does this all even remotely matter? The recent evolution of the web has demonstrated the power of motivated individuals or groups in the face of traditionally omnipotent policymakers, whether governments or corporations. As these tools get more refined and more people realize the power they hold, it’ll be easier to amplify an important message. In light of this, one of the more important facets of this new mode of interaction is that it’s all voluntary; you don’t have to listen to the loudspeakers or participate if you don’t want to- just unfollow someone. You’re only as effective as the level of engagement you show with those around you. I imagine seeing more platforms specifically dedicated to the promotion of large-scale movements that utilize the power of real-time networks. These social media sites hold a lot of promise of “individual empowerment” and the like; it’ll be fun to see how they live up to the hype.

I hate to talk so much about Facebook, but given its sheer size (200 million worldwide users and growing) and control of the social graph, it is simply the most relevant entity in the social web. The company is quickly approaching a critical period in its evolution— establishment of a sound business model— and the rest of the web waits with bated breath to examine the results and implications. As such, it’s no surprise that it recently overhauled its design again, adding a new kind of functionality that alters the dynamic of what Facebook can accomplish.

I read a recent piece by Joshua Porter that hits the nail on the head as far as Facebook’s most recent strategy moves are concerned— Facebook is going asymmetric, allowing users to maintain a unidirectional “follow” relationship with any other user.

Facebook will grow their service by allowing people to accrue attention in a way they can’t currently in the system. People will realize the same benefits they currently do on Twitter…you can actually start to have an audience that is larger than your current friends list. In other words, this will allow members of Facebook to have a much larger reach than they could before…thus giving Facebook a larger reach as well. This will be the next big growth spurt for Facebook, who has executed so well on almost everything they’ve done so far…but at the present moment the structure of the system prevents this from happening.

Is this a good move? I believe so. The most salient point in that article to me was how an asymmetric model allows you to track & measure attention. I think we are moving towards attention as an underlying web currency (in a social network you could also call it “social capital”), and while we currently do not know how to monetize it, it’s pretty clear that any structure of a web business model will revolve around the attention metric (even assuming that traditional web advertising is not a sustainable model, a topic recently discussed by TechCrunch and The Economist, attention will still be the key component to leverage).

I do think they are taking a risk in trying to mold user behaviors— away from a more real-world-like symmetric friendship model into a more online-only asymmetric follower model. If anything though, I think Twitter is showing that this type of model is a great way for friends to interact. As a social tool, I get a TON of more value out of following real-word friends on Twitter than I do being their friends on Facebook. While this may not be the case for many of Facebook’s users, Facebook benefits from making this move open-ended. The site maintains its core offering- a communication utility for friends that emphasizes public wall communication and photo sharing, while at the same time diversifying the type of experience its users can get by adopting the real-time status updates model. While I personally won’t use Facebook for the latter, as a matter of choice, I’m already so invested in Facebook’s original product that I will not stop using it (all my real world friends use it, upload their pictures on it, etc.).

Facebook almost seems to benefit from this new type of ambiguity it’s established among its users. Is it a pseudo-news reader where you can go to get interesting links from friends, or is it a social utility where you can get frequent life updates from friends and communicate with them sporadically? Does it even matter what it is as long as you keep using it? 

I see the site as entering a strange experimental phase that I think will bear out some fascinating results and drive a more focused product strategy in the next 6-8 months. Again, this stage will prove vital in establishing Facebook as a sound business entity rather than just a dominant social network.

I’ve been a big user of Twitter the past few months, using the service to post short thoughts about sports, food, politics, and music, among other topics, while interacting with tons of people about my opinions and theirs. It’s like no other tool I’ve used, which explains its growing popularity. I recently came across the following quote, from Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s book New Rules for the New Economy about our information economy:

The new economy is about communication, deep and wide. All the transformations suggested in this book stem from the fundamental way we are revolutionizing communications. Communication is the foundation of society, of our culture, of our humanity, of our own individual identity, and of all economic systems. This is why networks are such a big deal. Communication is so close to culture and society itself that the effects of technologizing it are beyond the scale of a mere industrial-sector cycle. Communication, and its ally computers, is a special case in economic history. Not because it happens to be the fashionable leading business sector of our day, but because its cultural, technological, and conceptual impacts reverberate at the root of our lives.

In thinking about Twitter and microblogging, I realized that such services will significantly impact how we communicate and share opinions and information with each other in the future. 

The ability to disseminate written information and opinion to a group of people is tremendously powerful and valuable. Throughout history, this ability has gradually been available to more and more people. Blogging caused a pretty large shift in the axis of control (limiting access to individual broadcast ability), as millions of people gained the ability and platform to easily express and share their opinions with others. However, to this day blogging is still cast aside by a large majority of internet users, who view the generation and posting of long-form content as a burden and would rather interact through social media. Microblogging, meanwhile, so significantly lowers the barrier to entry for communicating to a group of people, and is such a natural activity, that everyone will end up doing it. The short-form nature of the content, while a hindrance to some, is actually a welcome restraint for most people, who might not have 500 words to say about everything they have an opinion on. Now, instead of going through the hassle of positing well-thought theses and posting long-form ideas to share their feelings, they can simply express their thoughts, easily conveying and sharing them with thousands of other people. Fred Wilson talks about the 21st century social media revolution, which entails “every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet”, and I’m right there with him. We will simply have the largest open repository ever of information about people’s explicit interests and opinions (up till now, much of that information has been hidden in implicit actions like clickstreams and search data, visible to only a privileged few corporations that collect it, like Google and DoubleClick). What are the implications of this? I believe this will be tremendously powerful in a cultural sense. 

Everyone gets a chance to be heard. Nowadays, when you search about something, you may get many results, but they are still all from a few “sources” more or less- popular news outlets, information platforms like Wikipedia, and maybe a few blogs here and there. In its current incarnation, search is still powerful enough to give us a very good idea of the general sense of things— we understand an issue as seen by a few (relative to the billions in our global population) people. Services like Summize (now Twitter Search) have been building tools to analyze popular sentiment across the internet, scouring blogs and news articles, and could be valuable in helping understand general public opinion. Now, imagine something like that which didn’t just look through a few hundred news sources (many simply repeating each other), but rather analyzed the explicit, stated opinions of millions of users. While of course that has significance to the business/advertising sector, I see this being one of the most important political developments in history— the ability to easily share your opinions in an open forum, and be heard. If governments, businesses, and other concentrated power groups were forced to use such tools and meet the demands and expectations of the people, it would be a huge step towards a truly democratically functioning society. We’ve already begun to see this happen, such as in the 2008 presidential elections which made great use of social media tools, but microblogging has not yet risen to the role of prominence that it will occupy in our society.

The internet, as it currently stands, is already the easiest and most powerful platform for personal expression and mass influence we’ve ever had. The emergence of tools like Twitter shows how we’re still at just the start of the revolution.

Update: Fred Wilson echoes these thoughts in a February 10 post:

“… there is no absolute truth, just your truth and my truth. I post my truth here everyday and I hope you’ll drop by and share your truth with me.
This is the promise of social media. It’s revolutionary. When you give every citizen in the world a printing press, you ought to expect revolution. And it is upon us […] We’ve moved past the time when big institutions controlled what we read, what we thought, and what we believed. And we are arriving at a new place where each and everyone of us will report on our world and share it with others. Sharing is the new truth.”

You’ve probably heard about the Pickens Plan (the oil tycoon is spending $58 million on an extensive ad campaign to raise awareness). Here’s a short video outlining T. Boone Pickens’ vision for the future of energy in this country— basically achieved by investing resources to build up our wind energy infrastructure, and using our natural gas reserves instead of depending on foreign oil.

The plan would certainly help us reduce dependency on oil imports and decouple foreign policy from energy policy (and, argues Thomas Friedman, weaken leverage possessed by authoritarian oil-producing countries). In addition, it is the New Deal-type plan that many are clamoring for (while others dismiss), a large-scale infrastructure project expected to generate thousands of jobs. To that effect, Pickens cites the story of a town called Sweetwater, TX, which experienced a revival of sorts after a large wind power facility was built outside of town.

However, I can’t help thinking that this plan, ambitious as it is, lacks imagination and is not the bold type of action we really need to see. I see a few key problems:

• Pickens downplays the role of electric cars, which he says are 20-30 years away from having a real impact on the industry. When cars like the Tesla Roadster are hitting the streets in 2008, it suggests that the rest of the industry could achieve similar results given forward thinking and smart investments. We should be trying to make the country as carbon-free as possible, not simply transferring the burden of fossil fuels from international providers to the US.
• Keeping with that line of thinking, this plan does nothing to address the woes in Detroit. Any comprehensive energy policy has to have more of an impact on auto manufacturers than just converting their power source to natural gas. The confluence of problems (environmental, financial, energy) we’re facing now means that we’re looking at a historic opportunity to redefine the American auto industry and secure its long-term viability. This is a chance to breathe life into a vital (but failing) American industry by pushing investment in clean technologies and demanding innovative thinking and action.
• We need a smart national power grid to enable transfer of electricity between networks to deal with unstable wind generation (wind doesn’t blow all the time), a topic not discussed by Pickens.

Al Gore has proposed an even more ambitious plan, likening a 10-year energy independence plan to the Apollo Project to launch a successful moon landing in 10 years. The five elements of his plan, detailed here in a NYTimes op-ed by Gore, are:

• Incentives for construction of concentrating solar-thermal power plants in the southwest, wind farms in the Midwest, and plants in geothermal “hot spots.”
• A $400 billion investment over 10 years to build a “national smart grid” to distribute renewable energy, which he said would quickly offset the annual $120 billion loss from power grid failures. The power grid can be outfitted so that consumers have better tools and information for conserving energy.
• Aid to automakers to convert to the production of plug-in hybrids. Smart-grid technology that enables the cars to be charged during off-peak hours.
• A nationwide effort to retrofit buildings, which account for 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, to be more energy-efficient.
• Climate regulations to cap carbon dioxide emissions.

It’s clear that at this point in time, when we actually have the leverage to force two gargantuan industries (auto & energy) to redefine their modus operandi, we need big ideas that move us towards the vision of a carbon-free future, creating jobs, boosting the economy, and securing the environment. If now is not the time for long-term forward thinking, when ever? My final verdict on the Pickens Plan- green, but not green enough.

Facebook, while indispensable as a social utility to a large portion of its 100 MM (and growing) monthly users, is still seen by many as overhyped. Sure, two of Web 2.0’s key developments— the News Feed and the application platform— came from Facebook, but still, at its core, isn’t Facebook Just Another Social Network? How can Zuckerberg & Co. possibly justify the $15 billion valuation they received in late 2007?

Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most beleaguered executives of our generation, with public consensus on his status ranging from visionary to just plain lucky. Facebook Beacon, heralded by him as a once-in-a-century paradigm shift in advertising, horribly backfired due to privacy concerns catalyzed by poor execution. Many even predicted that the user outrage would lead to Facebook’s demise— they were obviously wrong, not understanding how Facebook has cemented itself in the social fabric of the YouTube generation. Facebook recovered by letting users opt out of the Beacon program, eventually scrapping all implementations of Beacon because of the clear reticence of users to broadcast their every action and intention to their social graph.

So where’s Facebook headed now? They’ve been making some key strategy moves on the product side that hint at a more cohesive overall vision for the company, one that could have significant implications on how we use the internet.

Facebook seems to be developing an underlying social operating system for the web, a “social layer” that sits between users and their web experience, enhancing it by providing relevant information derived from what Facebook knows about you and your social graph. Facebook’s new site redesign, Facebook Connect, and the site’s integration with Microsoft Live Search are all recent developments that signal a shift towards this larger vision, and once you connect the dots, it’s clearer to see.

First, it’s important to consider Microsoft’s $240 M investment in Facebook. It’s easy to see Microsoft’s influence on some of Facebook’s recent design changes.

Witness:

The application bar at the bottom left is eerily reminiscent of Windows and its familiar “Start” menu. Facebook recently redesigned its site, making it cleaner and more focused on highlighting social interactions and developments (more emphasis on “The Feed”). With the applications being pushed to the side (no longer featured on users’ profile pages), the site looks increasingly structured and rigid. It almost looks like Facebook’s designers wanted to convey a clear message— grow up; if you want frivolous applications and freedom to express yourself, go to Bebo or MySpace.

Microsoft’s influence on Facebook has been more than merely cosmetic, though. Just last week, Facebook integrated Microsoft Live Search into its search bar, allowing users to search the internet from within Facebook. While they haven’t added this functionality yet, it’s not hard to imagine them filtering results based on the search results, click patterns, and “sent links” of your social graph. This is a flavor of the crowd-sourced search we’ve seen from companies like Mahalo and Wikia, but far more powerful— it’s taking an already efficient search algorithm, Live Search, and enhancing its results based on the activities of your friends and their friends (and possibly your interests as well). Which do you think would provide you with better results- this or Google? (Don’t answer yet— wait till the system evolves). Based on this vision, it’s clear that Microsoft and Facebook could be on to something big. Expect to hear more about Live Search within Facebook in the coming weeks and months.

Next- Facebook Connect. This is one of the company’s most important (and arguably most ambitious) strategy initiatives to date. From TechCrunch:

At the most basic level, Facebook Connect will let you sign into Digg and all of these other partner Websites with nothing more than your Facebook username and password. Facebook wants to become the universal ID on the Web, and any progress it makes on that front would be a big deal in its own right. But Facebook Connect goes well beyond an ID management system. Partners can tap into all sorts of social data people put into their Facebook profiles, and actions on partner sites can be reflected back on your Facebook News Feed in a Beacon-like manner.

Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg, clearly believes in the potential of Facebook Connect, explaining:

It is the next step of collaborative filtering. It is the idea that instead of looking at a social network that you’ve created yourself, that you’ve entered in the names, I am going to look at all of you, everyone, and I’m going to compare you all together. I am going to find people like you and I am going to use that collective wisdom to find things that are more specifically interesting to you.

Facebook is planning to roll out Connect soon to a number of partner sites, including Six Apart, ABC, CBS, Hulu, Kongregate, Loopt, Plaxo, Seesmic, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vimeo, and Xobni. All the data gathered from Facebook users on those sites will only increase Facebook’s competitive advantage here (their repository of social information), so it is not hard to imagine Facebook building up an insurmountable lead as far as developing an understanding of user habits and interests, related to their social graphs. Would any site not want access to this immensely valuable store of information on over 100 million users (as well as easy access to the users themselves, who no longer have to sign up for accounts on those sites, which is traditionally a barrier to adoption)? Facebook has a huge game-changer on their hands with Connect, a social platform that can singlehandedly power dozens of sites.

In sum, Facebook, unwittingly or not, seems to be moving towards a cohesive vision of an underlying social operating system for the Web. Microsoft’s investment and oversight may have driven this strategy direction, as Live Search integration figures to be a key component of Facebook in the future. The site redesign hints at a strategy that transcends that of other social networks, and Facebook Connect is sure to redefine many aspects of the social web ecosystem.

Facebook’s soon going to establish itself as a force to be reckoned with (maybe even on the scale of Google— suddenly, that statement doesn’t seem so outlandish). In the meantime, it’s up to smart entrepreneurs to figure out ways to create value in the new supply chain of the social web.

I believe that we need to figure out a way to unlock the true potential of the web wrt causes for social change and benefit, especially to impact those in third world countries (if such potential even exists, and I believe it does).

The web is extremely powerful for being able to connect up millions of people with similar thoughts, ideas, or intentions, and to facilitate interactions between these people. The ease of finding information and engendering interactions has partially resulted in what we call the attention economy, which treats human attention as a scarce commodity. It stands to reason that this attention therefore has implicit value (does attention actually have implicit value if it is not acted upon?), and I hope we can find a way to capitalize on it to allow people to effortlessly contribute to social good. 

Getting people to help the needy is, as I see it, a 2 part problem, consisting of:

1) generating lasting awareness (not the 10 seconds of empathy you feel upon watching the news on CNN), and creating a genuine desire within individuals to want to contribute to the goal of eradicating the ill/problem at hand, and

2) empowering these people with the tools to make changes for the better.

The second part, while appearing innocuous enough, is actually far more nuanced than the first, and is the real problem that we need to solve. How many of us feel terrible about extreme poverty, about preventable disease in third-world countries, about the lack of access to basic human needs for a large portion of our global population? Yet, how many of us actually contribute something to the larger cause on a daily basis? While this is cynical, I believe that the tools we give to people contribute to change simply cannot require them to inconvenience their lifestyle. Typical solutions, to bring about real change, require people to donate substantial amounts of either:

Money— this is obviously difficult in tough economic times (but do the poor no longer feel hunger when the Dow falls 500 points?),

-or-

Time— people will give up only so much of their time (this varies from person to person, depending on their desire to elicit change— some will join the Peace Corps, others will volunteer at the soup kitchen), and most of the time will continue to do so only if they can see visible evidence of their impact (after all, who wants to contribute their precious time to a losing cause? Again, this “evidence threshold” varies from person to person).

What we really need is to tap into the power of the attention economy and the ability of the internet to connect people with common goals, and create a system whereby we can easily contribute to positive change in the world. What we need is a common platform to educate people about desperate problems that need their attention, and provide them with simple, easy-to-implement ways to bring about the solution.

Web 2.0 generates a lot of buzz for its ability to easily connect people & allow them to create & share their own content, and for overall generating whole systems that are greater than the sum of their parts. It’s time to take that ideal and apply it to things that really need our attention.

[UPDATE: Today also happens to be Blog Action Day, where at least 9,000 bloggers are writing about poverty]