Tagged: Co-creation RSS

  • Gaurav Mishra 7:30 pm on March 14, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Co-creation, Colelctive Action, , , , , , , Empodera, , , ,   

    My Empodera/ e-STAS Book Chapter — A New Approach to Citizen Activism: The 5Cs Framework 

    Welcome back to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!

    I recently wrote a book chapter for a book published by Empodera for the e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action. You can download the PDF version of the book here.

    Here’s the full text of the book chapter is titled “A New Approach to Citizen Activism: The 5Cs Framework” –

    Social Technologies and Power Structures

    The debate on whether internet and mobile technologies are transforming traditional power structures is dominated by three divergent narratives.

    According to the first, utopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies enable individuals to publish and distribute content, self-organize into communities of interest and participate in collective action. As a result, they can create new types of media outlets, build new types of civil society organizations, and monitor, protest against and even bring down governments. Even though these new degrees of freedom are far from universal, they are fundamentally changing political power structures. The future has already arrived, this narrative insists, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

    According to the second, status quo, narrative, power structures are ingrained into our society’s institutions and internet and mobile technologies don’t really change these institutions, or create new ones. The case studies compiled by the utopians constitute anecdotal evidence, at best, and the influence of networked technologies will always be limited because of issues related to access or ability. So, internet and mobile technologies are a minor influence on political power structures, at best.

    According to the third, dystopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies are, in fact, enabling traditional institutions to further consolidate their power through censorship, surveillance and propaganda. So, even though they give us the illusion of greater power, they have, indeed, compromised our ability to protect our privacy, have access to diverse views, and build real institutions.
    It’s not easy to conclusively argue for one narrative or the other, unless we outline the entire range of possibilities that social technologies open up for citizens and activists.

    The 5Cs Framework

    Social technologies encompass many different types of tools, such as blogging (Wordpress, http://wordpress.com), microblogging (Twitter, http://twitter.com), video-sharing (YouTube, http://youtube.com), photo-sharing (Flickr, http://flickr.com), podcasting (Blog Talk Radio, http://blogtalkradio.com), mapping (Google Maps, http://maps.google.com), social networking (Facebook, http://facebook.com), social voting (Digg, http://digg.com), social bookmarking (Delicious, http://delicious.com), lifestreaming (FriendFeed, http://friendfeed.com), wikis (Wikipedia, http://wikipedia.com), virtual worlds (Second Life http://secondlife.com), and several new and hybrid tools.

    Cutting across these tools, there are five underlying dynamics in social technologies, the 5Cs of social media: Content, Conversation, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these five dynamics constitute the value system of social technologies. The tools are transient, the buzzwords will change, but the value system embedded in these 5Cs is here to stay.

    If we wish to understand whether and how social technologies can empower citizens, it’s useful to explore how citizens and activists can leverage these five dynamics.

    The First C: Content

    The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social technologies allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.
    User generated content is the driver of the citizen journalism phenomenon, the notion that amateur users can perform journalist-like functions (accidentally or otherwise) by reporting and commenting on news. Citizen journalists have repeatedly emerged as critical in crisis reporting and several citizen journalist platforms like CNN iReport (http://ireport.com) Global Voices (http://globalvoicesonline.org), NowPublic (http://nowpublic.com) and AllVoices (http://allvoices.com) have emerged to harness their potential to report hyper-local news.

    However, just because everyone can become a creator doesn’t mean that everyone does. Researchers have found support for the 1:9:90 rule in many different contexts. The 1:9:90 rule says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators.

    At the Content level, the design challenge is to create or harness focused content creation platforms that scale even if only 1% of the users create content.

    So far, most initiatives in India have struggled in this respect. Platforms like MeriNews (http://merinews.com) are too entertainment focused to be called citizen journalism platforms and individual or group blogs like Kafila (http://kafila.org) don’t have the scale to make a meaningful impact.

    The Second C: Conversation

    The second C, Conversation, refers to the idea that social technologies enable two-way dialogues between citizens that sometimes take the form of viral memes and tip into the mainstream consciousness.

    One to one conversations tip into viral memes as consumers and curators congregate around compelling content. Natural disasters like the China earthquake and South East Asia tsunami and crisis situations like the Israel-Gaza war and the Mumbai terrorist attacks often lead to viral memes, sometimes misleading ones.

    Sometimes, activism campaigns also tip into viral memes. The 2009 Valentine’s Day Pink Chaddi campaign (http://thepinkchaddicampaign.blogspot.com) that protested against the right wing political party Sri Ram Sena by sending them pink panties as Valentine’s Day gifts became viral when more than 50,000 people joined in on Facebook.

    At the Conversation level, the design challenge is to create compelling content that demands to be shared and seed conversations around it that can tip into a viral meme.

    Evidence suggests that the art of designing viral activism campaigns hasn’t been perfected yet and most campaigns that to go viral happen to tip and find it difficult to replicate their own success later.

    The Third C: Collaboration

    The third C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social technologies facilitate the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

    Collaboration can happen at two levels: co-creation and collective action.

    In co-creation, the value lies as much in the curated aggregate as in the individual contributions. Wikis are a perfect example of co-creation. Open group blogs, photo pools, video collages and similar projects are also good examples of co-creation.

    Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.

    At the Collaboration level, the design challenge is to start with a big task, break it down into individual actions (modularity) that are really small (granularity), and then put them together into a whole without losing value (aggregating mechanism).

    In 2009, I co-founded a crowdsourced election monitoring platform Vote Report India (http://votereport.in) that is a good example of a platform designed for co-creation. The Ushahidi (http://ushahidi.org) based platform presented an aggregated visual view of irregularities in the 2009 Indian elections by plotting text messages sent from polling booths on a Google Map. However, we realized that the platform couldn’t scale without tapping into an offline volunteer network. Kiirti (http://kiirti.org) is a more evolved co-creation platform that factors in the need for such an offline support ecosystem.

    The Pink Chaddi campaign resulted in more than 2000 pink panties being sent to Sri Ram Sena and is a good example of collective action in India.

    The Fourth C, Community

    The fourth C, Community, refers to the idea that social technologies can facilitate sustained engagement around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

    The notion of a community is really tricky because every web page is a latent community, waiting to be activated. A vibrant community has size and strength, and is built around a meaningful social object. Often, lifestyles, passions and causes make for more compelling social objects than people, organizations, or campaigns.

    At the Community level, the design challenge is to identify a compelling social object and build a large and vibrant community around it.

    I am currently working on iJanaagraha (http://ijanaagraha.org), a community platform built around the notion that real change begins in the neighborhood. It’s a new type of citizen platform, with strong location, community and activation layers, designed to promote proactive citizenship by providing citizens the information, tools and networks to drive real change in their neighborhoods and cities.

    The Fifth C, Collective Intelligence

    The fifth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

    Collective intelligence can be based on both implicit and explicit actions and often takes the form of reputation and recommendation systems. Google (http://google.com) extracts the pagerank, a measure of how important a page is, from our (implicit) linking and clicking behavior. Amazon (http://amazon.com) and Netflix (http://netflix.com) are able to offer us recommendations based on our (implicit) browsing, (implicit) buying and (explicit) rating behavior and comparing it to the behavior of other people like us.

    It becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

    At the Collective Intelligence level, the design challenge is to aggregate our individual and collective actions in databases, and run sophisticated algorithms on them to build reputation and recommendation systems.

    Barack Obama’s presidential campaign (http://my.barackobama.com) and some of the work done by the Sunlight Foundation (http://sunlightfoundation.com) are good examples of citizen initiatives that tap into collective intelligence. I haven’t seen any good examples of such initiatives in India, but we are building such capabilities in the iJanaagraha platform.

    In Summary

    So, the 5Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social technologies.

    As we move from Content to Conversation to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them.

    Each layer is often, but not always, a pre-requisite for the next layer. Compelling content is a pre-requisite for conversation memes and meaningful collaboration, which is a pre-requisite for a vibrant community, which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for collective intelligence.

    The 5Cs framework can also be used to design and measure specific social technologies initiatives. The best social technologies initiatives leverage all these five layers, but most initiatives get stuck between the Collaboration and Community layers. Examples of social technologies initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers are few and far between.

    I want to emphasize that each layer is valuable in itself, and it’s OK to design an initiative to only exploit the Content or Conversation layers. It’s important to note, however, that institution-building kicks in only at the Collaboration and Community layers, and real change happens only when we build new institutions.

    Finally, evidence has shown us that all these five underlying dynamics can be used for both good and evil. Misleading or inflammatory content can be used to drive propaganda and spread rumors. Communities can easily become cabals and collaboration and collective intelligence can be used to profile and persecute minorities and other disadvantaged groups.

    Social technologies open up possibilities for new behaviors and new power structures. It’s up to us, as individuals and societies, to choose how we use these possibilities. The question is: how well will we choose?

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 6:26 am on May 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Co-creation, , , , , , , , Contributions, , , , Findability, , Interactions, , , Offsite, Onsite, Popularity, Predictability, Recommendation, , , Semantic Analysis, Sentiment, , , , , , , Transactions, ,   

    The 20:20 Approach to Social Media Analytics 

    20:20 Social Media Analytics Blog

    Introduction: The Problem With Social Media Analytics

    The 20:20 Social Media Analytics Blog aims to become your preferred resource on the best practices in social media monitoring and measurement, by cutting through the confusion on what to measure and how to measure it.

    Let me assure you that there is much confusion to cut through in the area of social media analytics.

    The discussion on social media analytics is dominated by three different narratives.

    According to the first business-as-usual narrative, the metrics we measure on social media should be the same business metrics we measure otherwise. The metrics might include lead conversions for the Sales function, brand loyalty for the Marketing function and customer satisfaction for the Customer Support function. The decision on whether to invest in social media programs should be taken based on the relative effectiveness of these programs to achieve business objectives.

    According to the second ad-value-equivalence narrative, buzz is the single most important metric to track on social media. The decision on whether to invest in social media programs should be taken based on whether the value of the buzz created by these programs is higher than the visibility generated by spending the same money on advertising.

    According to the third markets-are-conversations narrative, social media is about engaging in conversations and building relationships and businesses shouldn’t even be trying to measure it. A version of this narrative argues that social media is a fundamental game changer and businesses that do not adapt to it will risk being left behind. So, not engaging with social media isn’t a viable alternative for businesses anymore.

    We think that all three narratives are flawed because they fail to factor in the multi-layered nature of social media. As a result, most of the discussion revolves around the relative merits of focusing on “return on investment (ROI)” or “engagement”, while no one really agrees on what these terms mean.

    In this post, I’ll explain the 20:20 Approach to Social Media Analytics, which is rooted in a unique understanding of how social media works.

    The 4Cs Social Media Framework

    20:20 Web Tech Approach to Social Media Analytics: What is Social Media?

    Instead of getting distracted by the tools and the terminologies, we focus on the four underlying themes in social media, the 4Cs of social media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these four themes constitute the value system of social media.

    The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.

    The second C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

    The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

    The fourth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

    The 4Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social media. Each layer is often a pre-requisite for the next layer, and, as we move from Content to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them.

    The 4Cs Approach to Social Media Analytics

    20:20 Web Tech Approach to Social Media Analytics: What to Measure?

    The 4Cs social media framework is useful for both designing social media programs and measuring their effectiveness.

    At the Content level, the design challenge is to factor in the 1:9:90 rule, which says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators.

    Content that is easy to find and easy to spread becomes popular, so the key Content metrics are popularity, virality and findability. Popularity metrics include pageviews, clicks and time spent. Virality metrics include comments, trackbacks, bookmarks, votes and retweets. Findabilty metrics include the entire range of search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) metrics.

    At the Collaboration level, the design challenge is to raise the game from conversations to co-creation and collective action.

    The key Collaboration metrics are conversations, contributions and transactions. Conversation metrics are similar to the quantitative virality metrics, but are more qualitative in nature, and factor in context, influence and sentiment. Contribution metrics include the quantity and quality of user submitted content, including feedback on current products/ processes and ideas for new products/ processes. Transaction metrics are primarily business metrics and include lead conversions, complaint closures and customer recommendations.

    At the Community level, the design challenge is to identify a relevant social object and build a large and vibrant community around it.

    The key Community metrics are membership, relationships and interactions. Membership metrics include the number and profile of the community members. Relationship metrics include the number and nature of connections between community members. Interaction metrics include the frequency and nature of interactions between community members.

    At the Collective Intelligence level, the design challenge is to aggregate our individual and collective actions in databases, and run sophisticated algorithms on them to build reputation and recommendation systems.

    The key Collective Intelligence metrics are sentiment, authority and predictability. Sentiment metrics include the strength and nature of positive and negative reactions, in a given context. Authority metrics include the influence of an individual or a group, within a given context. Predictability metrics include the precision and accuracy of the forecasts about the market or the company based on social media data mining.

    As we move from Content to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, the nature of the metrics changes from simple to complex and the role of human analysis increases, as machine analysis reaches its limits.

    The Social Media Analytics Triumvirate

    20:20 Web Tech Approach to Social Media Analytics: How to Measure?

    It’s impossible to measure all these metrics by any one tool or approach, so social media analytics needs to incorporate three different elements: onsite/ offsite web analytics, network/ influence analysis, and semantic/ content analysis.

    Popularity, findability and transaction metrics are in the domain of web analytics. Membership metrics are in the domain of network analysis. Sentiment metrics are in the domain of content analysis. Virality metrics are at the intersection of web analytics and network analysis. Contribution metrics are at the intersection of web analytics and content analysis. Relationship metrics are at the intersection of content analytics and network analysis. Authority, conversation, interaction and predictability metrics need a combination of all three types of analysis.

    In Summary: The 20:20 Approach to Social Media Analytics

    Most “social media experts” don’t even think beyond creating content and seeding conversations in designing social media programs. When it comes to measurement, they inevitably limit themselves to popularity and virality metrics.

    The 20:20 Approach to Social Media Analytics is based on a much more nuanced understanding of the multi-layered nature of social media.

    We recognize that social media programs can operate at any of the four levels of Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence, and each layer has a corresponding set of metrics.

    We understand that it’s impossible to calculate “return on investment”, unless we define the sought after “return” first.

    We appreciate that it’s not enough to focus on “engagement”, because engagement might mean popularity, virality, conversations, contributions, or interactions, separately or simultaneously.

    We believe that social media analytics should use a combination of the tools and approaches from onsite/ offsite web analytics, network/ influence analysis, and semantic/ content analysis.

    Finally, we believe that there are limits to machine analysis, and it’s important to add a layer of human analysis on top of the technology.

    20:20 Web Tech wants to become the human layer on top of social media analytics technology, by exploiting the social media outsourcing opportunity presented by India’s cost-effective, tech-savvy, English speaking workforce.

    Here is a small presentation on the 20:20 Approach to Social Media Analytics (PDF/ PPTX/ SlideShare) –

    For more details, write to: gaurav AT 2020webtech DOT com.

    Cross-posted at the 20:20 Social Media Analytics Blog.

     

    • Josh 10:51 pm on May 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Certainly an in depth analysis of what the technological aspect of social media is. Would the human layer, as you put it, have a more organic approach in this process or are you considering some systematic approach as well?

    • Gaurav Mishra 5:10 am on May 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      @Josh: Thank you. Content analysis is a really complex topic and one of my next posts will be on our approach to content analysis.

    • max191 3:56 pm on October 6, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I entered your blog from google search. You really have done a good effort. Thanks for the wonderful blog.
      regards
      charcoal grill

  • Gaurav Mishra 12:55 pm on May 10, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Co-creation, , , , , , , Daily Kos, , , , , Netflix, Obama Girl, , recommendation Systems, Reputation Systems, , Talking Points Memo, , Value System,   

    The 4Cs Social Media Framework 

    The 4Cs Social Media Framework

    The Need for the 4Cs Social Media Framework

    Over the last year, I have had to explain how social media works to diplomats, defense officials, and academics and students focused on fields as diverse as international affairs, management and sociology.

    I have found that first-timer find social media confusing because of two reasons.

    The first reason is the excessive focus on specific social media tools. Many first-timers are introduced to social media via specific tools. Many ’social media experts’ who are practitioners rather than thinkers also focus on specific tools. Since social media encompasses many different types of tools, and each tool has specific characteristics and a steep learning curve, a toolkit approach can quickly become overwhelming. Blogging (Wordpress), microblogging (Twitter), video-sharing (YouTube), photo-sharing (Flickr), podcasting (Blog Talk Radio), mapping (Google Maps), social networking (Facebook), social voting (Digg), social bookmarking (Delicious), lifestreaming (Friendfeed), wikis (Wikipedia), and virtual worlds (Second Life) are all quite different from each other and new and hybrid tools are being introduced almost everyday. Mastering each tool individually seems like a lot of work and a lot of people give up even before they begin.

    The second reason is a clear definition of what social media is, even within the social media community. Different thinkers and practitioners use different terms to describe similar tools and practices. Terms like social media, digital media, new media, citizen media, participatory media, peer-to-peer media, social web, participatory web, peer-to-peer web, read write web, social computing, social software, web 2.0, and even crowdsourcing and wikinomics can mean similar or slightly different things depending upon who is using it. Journalists, marketers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, software vendors and academics approach the space from their own perspectives and have their own preferred terms. Used precisely, these terms can mean very different things. However, very few people use these terms precisely and almost nobody agrees on the exact definition of these terms.

    The 4Cs Social Media Framework

    My own approach to social media is both tool-agnostic and terminology-agnostic. So, I use the term social media to encompass all the tools and all the practices that are described by the terms I mentioned above.

    Instead of getting distracted by the tools and the terminologies, I focus on the four underlying themes in social media, the 4Cs of social media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these four themes constitute the value system of social media. I believe that the tools are transient, the buzzwords will change, but the value system embedded in these 4Cs is here to stay. So, let’s look at these 4Cs in some detail.

    The First C: Content

    The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.

    User generated content, and the hope of monetizing it through advertising, is at the core of the business model of almost all social media platforms. User generated content is also at the core of citizen journalism, the notion that amateur users can perform journalist-like functions (accidentally or otherwise) by reporting and commenting on news. Citizen journalists have repeatedly emerged as critical in crisis reporting and several citizen journalist platforms have emerged to harness their potential to report hyper-local news.

    However, just because everyone can become a creator doesn’t mean that everyone does. Most users prefer to consume user generated content, by reading blog, watching videos, or browsing through photos. Some user curate user generated content, by tagging it on social bookmarking websites, voting for it on social voting websites, commenting on it, or linking to it. Researcher have found support for the 1:9:90 rule in many different contexts. The 1:9:90 rule says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators.

    The Second C: Collaboration

    The second C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

    Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action.

    As consumers and curators engage with compelling content, the content becomes the center of conversations. Conversations create buzz, which is how ideas tip, become viral. Many social media practitioners who are from a marketing or public relations background are focused on creating conversations.

    However, some of us recognize that conversations are a mere stepping stone for co-creation. In co-creation, the value lies as much in the curated aggregate as in the individual contributions. Wikis are a perfect example of co-creation. Open group blogs, photo pools, video collages and similar projects are also good examples of co-creation.

    Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.

    Even though conversations, co-creation and collective action are different forms of collaboration, the difficulty in collaborating increases dramatically as we move from conversations to co-creation to collective action. The key is to start with a big task, break it down into individual actions (modularity) that are really small (granularity), and then put them together into a whole without losing value (aggregating mechanism). It is also important to bridge online conversations into mainstream media buzz and online engagement into offline action.

    The Third C: Community

    The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

    The notion of a community is really tricky because every web page is a latent community, waiting to be activated. A vibrant community has size and strength, and is built around a meaningful social object.

    Most people understand that a community that has a large number of members (size) who have strong relationships and frequent interactions with each other (strength) is better than a community which doesn’t. However, a community is more than the sum total of its members and their relationships.

    People don’t build relationships with each other in a vacuum. A vibrant community is built around a social object that is meaningful for its members. The social object can be a person, a place, a thing or an idea. The Netroots community is built around progressive politics in America. The My Barack Obama community was built around Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The Obama Girl community was built around a series of videos Amber Lee Ettinger made to support Obama’s campaign. Sometimes, choosing the right social object can be crucial for building a vibrant community. HP can choose to build a community around printers, printing, or corporate careers, all of which will have very different characteristics.

    The Fourth C: Collective Intelligence

    The fourth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

    Collective intelligence can be based on both implicit and explicit actions and often takes the form of reputation and recommendation systems. Google extracts the pagerank, a measure of how important a page is, from our (implicit) linking and clicking behavior. Amazon and Netflix are able to offer us recommendations based on our (implicit) browsing, (implicit) buying and (explicit) rating behavior and comparing it to the behavior of other people like us. eBay and Amazon assign ratings to sellers and reviewers respectively, based on whether other members in the community had a good experience with them. On the day of the 2008 US elections, the Obama campaign was able to assign trimmed down telecalling lists to volunteers by ticking off the names of the people who had already voted.

    The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

    The4Cs Social Media Framework in Summary

    So, the 4Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social media. As we move from Content to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them. Also each layer is often, but not always, a pre-requisite for the next layer. Compelling content is a pre-requisite for meaningful collaboration, which is a pre-requisite for a vibrant community, which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for collective intelligence.

    Although I designed the 4Cs framework to explain how I see social media, I have also found it to be a useful tools to evaluate specific social media initiatives. The best social media initiatives leverage all these four layers, but I have seen that most initiatives get stuck between the Collaboration and Community layers. Examples of social media initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers are few and far between. It’s important to note, however, that each layer is valuable in itself, and it’s OK to design an initiative to only exploit the Content or Collaboration layers.

    The 4Cs Social Media Framework Applied to Digital Activism

    Let me explain what I just said my applying the 4Cs framework to digital activism initiatives.

    Many digital activism initiatives like Social Documentary and Witness primarily focus on using social media tools to create and share compelling multimedia Content. Some of this Content generates Conversations and becomes viral and some of it might even lead to Collective Action. However, the focus is on Content.

    Other initiatives, like Vote Report India or the Pink Chaddi Campaign, start off with a strong focus on Collaboration around a specific event. In its first iteration, Vote Report India leveraged Co-creation by creating a platform for collectively tracking irregularities in the 2009 Indian elections. The Pink Chaddi Campaign leveraged Collective Action by asking its supporters to send pink panties to the Sri Ram Sena as Valentine’s Day gifts. As these campaigns become successful, they try to move to the next Community level, but don’t always succeed in building a long-term community.

    Very few digital activism initiatives are able to leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers. The Netroots community in the US, especially Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and MoveOn.org, have been able to build a strong Community around progressive politics in the US. My Barack Obama leverage some aspects of Collective Intelligence during the 2008 presidential campaign.

    What About You?

    If you are a social media practitioner or a digital activist focused on the Content and Collaboration layers, I would urge you to think about how you can move to the Community layer. If you already run a vibrant community, I would urge you to think about introducing reputation and recommendation systems in it and leverage the Collective Intelligence layer.

    If you are designing a new social media initiative, I would urge you to use the 4Cs Framework in the design and strategy phase itself. Perhaps, in phase one, you would want to start with a campaign built around Content and focused on Collaboration, with elements of co-creation and/ or collective action. You would do well to plan for a phase two which is focused on Community, with a dash of  Collective Intelligence built in. The question you want to ask yourself, then, is: how can I design a Collaboration based campaign so that it can be used to build a long-term Community?

    If you are a journalist, analyst or academic in the business of understanding social media initiatives, you’ll find the 4Cs Framework really useful. What are the boundary conditions needed to succeed at each layer? What are the boundary conditions needed to move from Content to Collaboration, from Collaboration to Community, and from Community to Collective Intelligence? Can you think of other digital activism or social media initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers?

    Do share your thoughts.

    Cross-posted at Digiactive, True/ Slant, Global Voices Advocacy and my fellowship blog.

     

    • Rajesh 7:28 am on May 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Gaurav, this is one of your most useful posts and I believe it must have taken a lot of thought, effort, perhaps time. For me, it is interesting that the most useful part of social media, collective intelligence, is often invisible while most people (marketers for sure) are invariably focused on content and leading buzz.

      Waiting for you to come back so we could exchange notes on your year’s learning. I envy you to say the least and would love to take time off and do a programme like yourself. Someday :) , in the interim I have been reading some of your stuff.

      Keep writing.

    • Gaurav Mishra 10:24 am on May 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      @Rajesh: Thank you. Yes, the 4Cs framework has been at the core of everything I have done last year. The top level framework itself has been around for a while and I have been using it in my class and my talks. However, the details have changed over the year, and will continue to change, I suspect.

    • Rajesh 10:31 am on May 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I know exactly what you mean – something that looks simple to the reader maybe the distilled learning derived from a long time. And yes, of course it is going to evolve with your inputs and from others too.

      Cheers

      Rajesh

    • Vijay Rayapati 2:34 pm on May 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Excellent post, Gaurav. While I agree that content is the king, but until there is a relevancy (usefulness to consumer) in the content created for your target user/consumer, it is very difficult to create collaboration among your content curators/consumers.

      The feeling of community can be initiated only when there is a relevancy, transparency and value creation.I think, relevant content & useful conversations are at the base to initiate a collaboration for building a vibrant community and the effectiveness of it can be measured by collective intelligence if we can set & identify the objective goals.

    • Regolo 11:37 am on May 12, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Great work you did here, just found out about you throught GV Advocacy. This 4 levels startup should be the referring framework for eveybody wishing to create web activism initiatives. Good Job!

    • RahulC 1:35 pm on May 12, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      A very thoughtful post Gaurav and it gives a different perspective of looking at the social media framework.

      I also agree with Vijay’s comment that content by itself cannot achieve anything, how relevant the content is to the user and what value it brings to the table are also critical factors.

    • Alan Moore 9:34 am on May 13, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      The 4C’s are: Commerce, Culture, Community, Connectivity

      http://smlxtralarge.com/?s=commerce+culture+community+connectivity

      From Communities Dominate Brands [Futuretext 2005]

      THE FOUR C’S

      As part of our research and exploring how the combinations of business, the media, culture, customer behaviour and technology are creating such dramatic change. We arrived at a concept that Axel Chaldecott and Alan Moore have described as the 4 C’s. These are: Commerce, Culture, Community and Connectivity.

      Our theory is that the once separate provinces of innovation and technology, business and economic activity, culture and communities are pulling and converging into one another, in increasingly intimate and more powerful combinations. In fact we believe they are inseperable. Understanding the 4C’s means that one can start to realize more differentiated routes to market, more compelling ways to engage ones customers and deliver organic growth.

      Commerce

      The driving engine for most human activity is the desire for gain. Commerce is based on this principle. Businesses expect to make a profit, and in the long run to bring greater economic value to their owners. Commerce had evolved over the millennia mostly independent of Culture, Connectivity and Community. Commerce existed in a mostly one-directional relationship with its customers. The power of commercial enterprises grew greatly with industrialisation at the expense of the opposite number Community.

      Now community, connectivity and culture are embedded into commerce in a multitude of ways. They offer gateways to commercial success if addressed properly within the context of that particular business. If we think about the retailer WH Smith, as we have identified there are many ways in which it could redefine its role for its customers and this redefinition is based entirely on the 4C’s.

      Community

      Communities are beginning to materialse as an economic and socio-economic force. Only over the past 10 years or so have we witnessed the rise of community. It has been a move back to localism, to friends and colleagues as frameworks for authoritative advice, and the age of the Do-It-Yourself demographic where communities can and will rapidly form around a collective agenda.

      As political and religious institutions become less dominant, as society becomes less rigid, we seek other bodies to belong to. These communities are more vibrant, more vocal, more dynamic, more connected and are often collected around a single issue. These communities can be global, national and local. Communities such as book clubs, anti-petrol price rise demonstrators, the truth detectors of the blogosphere, the 26,000 online news contributors to the Korean paper OH myNews, will counteract and balance against the interests of pure Commerce or become drivers of it.

      Technology via the internet, or the mobile phone, makes these communities highly informed, these communities feed off information, analyze that information – from collective points of view and determine action and then redistribute to their network.

      Commerce and Community moving closer

      Our recent past has been 200 years of an industrial age, mindset and order. This is no longer true, and we are emerging into a knowledge and service driven economy. Many industries have become highly saturated and differentiation is becoming increasingly difficult. On top of that industries have fragmented – creating even greater competition.

      Businesses have several communities that they can co-operate with; their own business community, we are already seeing the rise of joint business ventures, and societal communities. Generating win – win initiatives is the way forward for companies if they want to grow and survive.

      Businesses success requires greater agility, and greater quantities of creativity. It requires commerce to understand the importance of the rise social networks as the efficacy of its traditional business model comes under threat.

      Commerce via various channels has converged with culture, in a realisation that we just don’t shop the way we used to. Customers can no longer be identified by consumption alone. This process is turning retailing into a part of the entertainment industry, the entertainment industry into retailing.

      Commerce has to understand the other 3C’s if what it makes and what it produces is to have any chance of success in the market place. Ebay has demonstrated the powerful business model of connecting many to many as opposed to one to many. And generating a powerful trading community in the process.

      Culture

      There was a time when culture was considered a semi-autonomous and fringe element of the economy. During the middle ages there were a few artists who sculpted and painted, often paid for by the church or royalty. Before newspapers there was little mainstream literature or media. Today culture has become a major element of the global economy, from TV and radio, to movies, music, print media, books, videogames etc etc etc. Culture still has attributes to it that are business-like (a newspaper has to sell copies, a TV show has to generate an audience to sell advertisements) but Culture has also still today elements that are Community-directed. Many artists are “struggling” and holding onto a second job simply for the love of their artform, wanting to make a small contribution to culture, even if their dancing or acting or writing or musician career will never hit the big time and provide a full-time employment.

      Connectivity

      Three hundred years ago people were connected almost exclusively to those people they met on a regular basis. The family, the people at work, and perhaps the people on Sunday at church. A formal postal system started to expand connectivity beyond these contacts and the rolling out of steamship and railroad connections two centuries ago allowed people to maintain connections to friends and family even in other countries. But it was not until the widespread adoption of the telephone that enabled connectivity on a global level. And only with the advent of the internet did it become practical for the average person to regularly communicate with friends on other continents.

      Culture and Connectivity coming closer

      Culture is significant as a catalyst for connectivity. We want to talk about what we saw on TV, what we read in the newspaper, what we heard on the radio. Connectivity is significant in the spread of culture. Printing presses allowed book authors and press columnists to spread their thoughts. Radio broadcasting, motion pictures and music recordings from about a century ago, dramatically expanded the ability for culture to be spread. Television fifty years later further enhanced the reach of culture. Many might argue that there is a dilution of talent, that as we get ever more channels, the quality of culture diminishes to the point of approaching zero – witness current quality of “reality shows” on TV. Still, when considering in contrast, Connectivity and Culture support each other, act as opposites.

      As culture converges into the marketplace, the concept of rigid institutions, industry sectors ring-fenced from each other becomes seemingly antiquated. Our age is one in which science, economics, and politics challenge the notion of fixed categories, perceived oppositions, and impermeable boundaries. Successful brands and business ideas have to become part of popular culture and live within the daily vernacular, and be identified as bringing something positive into public consciousness rather than something that does not contribute a positive effect.

      Convergence in the 4 C’s

      Culture can gain from – and many purists might argue is damaged by Commerce. Commerce certainly can gain from Culture as we see from the various popular culture icons being recruited to endorse various products and services. Commerce can gain dramatically from Connectivity as it broadens the reach of Commerce. Because of Connectivity we can buy electical goods made in Korea etc. Obviously many Connectivity organisations benefit from Commerce, the global telecommunications industry alone delivers close to 4 percent of the global GDP.

      Communities can gain from Culture, bringing purpose and enlightenment to Communities. Culture can gain from Communities by expanding the reach of Culture. Technology is changing the capability as to how, what, where and with whom we consume culture. We are able to gather and find the things that are important to us in ways never before possible. This is part changes culture and gives greater importance to community and the connectivity of those communities.

      Set the controls for the heart of the 4C’s

      At the very centre of the “flower” model as we call it, is its heart, where Commerce, Culture, Community and Connectivity meet. Connectivity provides companies for the very first time the opportunity to generate two-way flows of information, feedback and engagement. Connectivity provides the opportunity for brands to create powerful pull mechanisms to their offerings and for customers to self segment themselves.

      Connectivity, enables via the internet and the mobile phone to identify who are prolific connectors and networks that could be key distribution point to viral contagion and sharing of word of mouth messaging. Connectivity alone is not enough, there must be good content (Culture) and a population of interest (Community). If this can be combined with a genuine business enterprise (Commerce) the sweet spot is achieved.

      In this book we have illustrated pioneering examples of where this convergence of the Four C’s is happening. The community of amateur journalists on the OhMyNews service in Korea is one such example. The 24,000 members of the amateur journalists use connectivity to create culture, and are paid for their contribution, hence commerce.

    • Jeff 9:16 am on May 14, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Very intriguing model. We cover digital media in Asia on our blog and included a link to yours. Many practitioners struggle with defining social media and struggle to get their head around the full extent of the concept. This will help many others. Thanks.

    • Suveer Bajaj 7:04 am on May 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      A very interesting outlook and approach to campaign creation in the Social media space. I loved how each of the 4 C’s are so interconnected and interdependent on each other. I think this post has beautifully highlighted the redundancy of a campaign that doesn’t systematically and comprehensively cover the spaces of the 4 cs and shows how most SM Practioneers have in fact, been running incomplete independent attempts at capitalizing the SM space.

    • Khanchana 6:20 pm on June 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Gaurav ,
      You seem to have conceptualised a good framework for social media. I find the Collective Intelligence part intriguing as that essentially contributes to business value from Social Networks.
      Would not Social Analytics be relevant here . I would like to see you share more on the SNA front . Pls do check my blog on relevance of Social Networks to Business and Commerce at
      http://www.infosysblogs.com/customer-relationship-management/2009/06/social_networks_in_business_an.html#more

      Thanks

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