Does Your Green Avatar and Yellow Wristband Matter?
#1 Thing You Need to Learn from this Post:
As we become more interconnected, your awareness for the world’s problems will continue to grow. While awareness leads to action, how you channel that action will mean the difference between meaningful change and suffocating cynicism.
A More Detailed Exploration:
Over the course of the past few months, I have been following the various strands of the same meta-conversation about social change and social media. People are wrestling with the fundamental shift that has brought about the Interconnected Age.
In this era of greater intimacy and immediacy, you and I are much more aware of the many problems facing humankind. More than just reading about some earthquake in a faraway land, the Internet brings these issues into our daily lives thru the robust experiences created by YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.
Requests to join a Facebook cause, change your avatar green, add a digital yellow bracelet to your avatar, follow a company on Twitter and they’ll give a gift, follow a non-profit on Twitter so they’ll give a grant, and many other options have begun to pile up. As more people and causes become aware of these efforts, we will see an even greater influx of similar requests.
Any doubts? Just start counting the number of charity 5k runs, color-coded ribbons, and color-coded bracelets filling the cause landscape. These were all innovative ideas at one time, but now have become as common as mimicking the “got milk?” campaign.
Does Any of This Matter?
For the most part, this meta-conversation involves two related, but often opposing, camps:
1. Promoters and marketers
2. Traditional social activists
For the promoters and marketers, yes it does. Online and social media gives you the tools to tell a compelling story and connect it to people around the world without the expense of traditional broadcast media like TV, radio, and bulk mailings. Not only can you get your cause in front of more people, you can make it easier for them to take some sort of action to show their support and encourage others to join them.
For traditional social activists, it’s not anywhere near as important as rolling up one’s sleeves and getting your hands dirty serving on the front lines of the cause. To some activists, they doubt the intentions of those promoting the cause – whether it be companies or individuals. Having thousands of people talking about the travesty of a real issue is nowhere near as important as lobbying governmental policy or being face-to-face with those affected by it.
The Engagement Flywheel: Awareness Creates Action
Through my years of rallying causes, I have come to understand the importance of what I call the Engagement Flywheel. In simple terms, the more you can make a person aware of a need, connect that need with that person’s personal interests, illustrate your vision for meeting that need, and demonstrate your continued progress, the more sparks of engagement you can create.
Those sparks can take the form of:
- talking about your cause with others
- giving money to your cause
- volunteering for your cause
- encouraging others to join with their support
Social Media Actions Can Matter
For those with causes rooted in systemic problems, changing your avatar (and its sibling actions) is just one type of engagement. But it isn’t a trivial action. Rather, it is a social signal that an issue matters to you. It opens up the door for others to ask about it. It also allows for those who were fearful to state the same opinion to join you publicly.
That’s a powerful force – when an individual takes a stand and knows he or she is not alone.
Derailing the Flywheel
Action cannot happen without awareness. But when that action does not produce meaningful change, cynicism grows. That’s when the backlash occurs. When you rally people around your cause and ask them to take an action that ends up only making them feel good about themselves momentarily leads to disenchantment.
The Questions at Hand
With the proliferation of social media tools, how can causes use them to spark meaningful actions? What are great examples of success? What are glorious failures?
Find me on Twitter: @scottyhendo
Scotty: A poignantly written post. I’d like to point out that those of us employed in the social & cause marketing space tend to be ultra sensitive to possible cynicism. I believe the experts are quicker to judge if a brand’s sponsorship is an innovative idea or a redundancy of yesteryear’s favored cause campaign. What some people describe as “clickocracy” in the digital yellow bracelets or green avatars, has a public reality of online vetting.
Still, it’s right to question whether or not a single click — to change your Twitter avatar, or join a Facebook cause page — can translate to real-world impact. Intuitively most of us know that social media offers a low bar of entry, and that the simplicity of joining a cause does not address the complexity of solving it. So yes, 95% of those “publicly visual” actions might seem pointless – but I personally believe they shouldn’t be dismissed.
When a group of people share a particular concern, they create collective consciousness. Social and cause marketing can identify a problem, and even be part of the vision of change. But it’s the people who create movements. Think back to the 2007 “Support The Monks’ Protest in Burma” on Facebook which garnered the support of almost a half million people. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma_Global_Action_Network) This online call-to-action was a milestone in the history of internet activism. The people who got involved largely weren’t dedicated activists — they were students. While the numbers in support of Iranian pro-democracy may not be as big, the “Angels of Iran” have offered an outlet to 36,000+ voices with tangible impact. (http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20090713/LIFE/907130312) Even the Kellogg Cares campaign to Fight Hunger has reportedly earned a 40:1 activity ratio of fans to actions. For every 40 people that are fans on the Facebook page, one person takes an action on a wall post like a wall comment, wall like, discussion comment, photo/video view or wall click. (http://vitrue.com/blog/2009/06/29/kellogg-cares-initiative-%E2%80%93-using-social-media-to-drive-awareness-for-causes/)
There are plenty examples of successes and failures. But the biggest challenge I see in the social action and cause space is how to empower individual activism so that the free-thinking of one age becomes the common sense of the next.
@KooDooZ
Thanks for encouraging such an interesting and timely discussion through this post, Scott. The question of whether or not online activism can lead to deeper offline civic engagement is one that we’ve given much thought to at the Case Foundation. However, where I think we’ve come up on the issue is that we’re no better off if we choose one or the other. Rather, the more important and more helpful question to ask, is how the two can complement and reinforce one another. I think that’s what you’re getting at when you write of the “engagement flywheel.”
We recently released a study about our online giving experiment, America’s Giving Challenge http://www.casefoundation.org/case-studies/giving-challenge In it, we share some of our lessons learned about how organizations were successful (and not) in recruiting individual donors through their online social networks. As Allison Fine (who co-authored the report) often writes, “tools like Twitter and Causes on Facebook are not ATM machines, successful efforts must build relationships with their supporters.” I think that’s true whether we’re talking about donors or activists – social media doesn’t create meaningful change, it’s merely a tool for doing so. These tools should help augment your traditional fundraising/or friendraising but not replace them.
There’s always going to be exceptions that prove the rule, but what you call the engagement flywheel, I’ve always looked at as greassing the skids. People don’t act when they are uninformed — they don’t even engage in discourse if it’s not on their radar.
While there are always exceptions, just the fact that people where a yellow bracelt, run a 5K, or flip the green swith on their avatar, they know what it is supporting. Does that lead to rolling up their sleeves and getting dirty? Not very often, but simply by the law of averages occassionally…
Do these easily-done activities/symbol displays, etc. take away from those that do, in fact, take a very active role? You could never convince me that it does — and for the people that do work in the trenches, I think it is conservatively-put, logical and intuitive to think their job is made a tad bit more seamless by these activities/symbol displays.
Every Cause encounters roadbumps or whalesale obstacles that slow forward progress. Greasing the skids when the wheels come off can be helpful — not a cure-all mind you (because, it is grease and not actual wheels of course) — but very helpful towards forward progress.
But that’s my opinion anyway — I think the question is best asked to those who DO roll up their sleeves: Do the things that others do to support and/or educate their Cause helps them.
Hey, Scott –
Thoughtful post and one that anyone involved in social change struggles with — how to raise awareness and influence action without engendering backlash. And, it’s a struggle that pre-dates the onset of social media — e.g., the yellow ribbons that first festooned almost every tree in America to call on Iranian revolutionaries to release American hostages in 1979. A year later, with the 53 Americans still held hostage, the ribbons became a painful reminder of our country’s inability to secure their release.
The backlash, I think, comes from raising awareness but not translating the awareness into action. The rise of social media — and it’s power to virally amplify a cause — raises, as you note, the likelihood of increased backlash. For all of us who work for change — or help organizations work for change — we need to have a stronger, clearer “ask” that is tied to the awareness — essentially your engagement flywheel. The “ask” also has to be manageable, personalized — particularly now during this recession when so many Americans feel constrained. Finally, we need to close the loop and go back and tell our supporters what they have helped accomplished and allow them to share in savoring of success.
Thanks @KooDooZ @socialcitizen @HoltMurray and @AnneMai for adding more perspective to the conversation. You’ve helped shed more light on the complexities of this issue and underscore the importance of focusing people to take meaningful action.