Engaging Networks’ #spark11 conference for non-profits

On Tuesday 14 June 2011 I attended Engaging Networks’ Spark event in London. Engaging Networks is the new name for Advocacy Online – the supporter engagement software that allows organisations to manage fundraising, campaigning/advocacy, email and social actions in a centralised platform.

Audience research – getting to know your Facebook Fans

We all know that the better we know and understand our audiences, the more likely our communications with them will be successful. If we’re already talking to people on Facebook, what do we know about who’s listening? Facebook Insights tells us the age and gender of our fans, and where they are, but nothing about what interests them. We can look at what content we put out and see what is the most engaging, but how would we know what we’re missing? Also, how do we know how different our fans are to the average Facebook user?

NixonMcInnes adopt Unison model workplace policy on domestic abuse

It’s world mental health day today, so I thought I’d blog about a related bit of recent NixonMcInnes news.

Last year I went to the Feminism in London conference and also to a seminar on women’s rights at Socialism 2010, and while there I learnt why domestic abuse is a workplace issue.

Victims of domestic abuse are likely to be affected in ways which affect their working lives – they may need to take time out of work, e.g. to visit a healthcare professional for physical or mental health reasons and their ability to deliver their actual work may be threatened – as such, workplaces need to take active steps to make sure they are not going to inadvertently discriminate against victims.

Current themes around social media and fundraising

Max and I did a presentation last week on the current themes around social media digital and fundraising (well, c’mon, digital is pretty much all social now, right?). Here’s a few of the big ones as we see it:

• Social proof
• Gaming
• Micropayments
• Geo-social
• Fundraising for campaign comms
• Corporate social sponsorship / partnership
• Crowd-sourced products / transactional donations

Happiness vs work

As many of you know, here at NixonMcInnes, in our attempts to prioritise people before profit, we measure happiness of the workforce.

As every ‘normal’ business should, we also measure how much chargeable work we’re doing.

I wondered – when we have tonnes of work to do, do we get stressed and unhappy? So, I mapped the two figures.

• Adactio: Journal—The password anti-pattern
• Elastic lists
• Well formed data
• Facebook Data Team
• Mouseprice – property information and data
• FlowingData | Data Visualization and Statistics
• Gist Power Tip: Export Facebook Page Fans – if out of date, check comments
• Global Web Index || Global research on web behaviour and social media involvement
• London Bike Share Map
• MarketingCharts: charts and data for marketers in web and Excel format
• NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel
• PHP/MySQL Tutorial – Part 3 and how to use a form to add data to a database (PHP template)
• Sprint: Plug into Now. – interesting mobile advertising campaign
• TargetMap – Create & share customized data maps on Googlemaps
• OkTrends – OkCupid data blog on people, sex and dating
• Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web (open data) | Video on TED.com
• Twiangulate: analyzing Twitter connections and also Twitter Counter
• We Feel Fine – AWESOME data visualisation on moods
• What is the Monkeysphere?
• Worldometers – real time world statistics

What are your favourites?

RSS Feed of Beth Granter’s Delicious Activism Links

Wikileaks is a non-profit news organisation that publishes previously secret information from anonymous sources. Recently Wikileaks published a bunch of stuff that exposed the US Government and other Governments for being dodgy. I haven’t read all the bits so I don’t know the details. The US Government got pissed off.

About a week later the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, was arrested for rape and sexual assault charges in London, on the basis of a case which had previously been closed. The US Government are now trying to have him extradited to Sweden. That’s quite convenient isn’t it. Although I heard he has admitted to an argument over a condom (he refused to wear one) which if true and he went ahead and had sex with a woman in circumstances she didn’t want, I believe is a form of rape, even if he wasn’t physically forcing her. One of the accusing women used to work for the US Embassy. Interesting.

The US Government also advised corporations not to support Wikileaks. So, Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, all forms of donating to Wikileaks, blocked payments to the non-profit. So nobody could help with legal costs for founder Julian Assange.

The Wikileaks website also came under denial of service attack (dDos – that’s illegal) which means the website breaks, so as a back-up, Wikileaks mirror sites (copies) are made all over the place.

Then came along Anonymous which is “not an organisation. There are no official members, guidelines, leaders, representatives or unifying principles. Rather, Anonymous is a word that identifies the millions of people, groups, and individuals on and off of the internet who, without disclosing their identities, express diverse opinions on many topics. To be Anonymous does not imply thinking or acting in concert with others who are Anonymous; rather, it describes a way of communicating and promoting social change.” I knew about them from Project Chanology – an anti Scientology activist group. So, people identifying as Anonymous then started a retaliation against attacks on Wikileaks. This was part of a pre-existing campaign called Operation Payback and involved dDos attacks on Paypal, Visa and Mastercard, managing to temporarily take Visa and Mastercard websites offline as well as breaking the Paypal API for a while. They used some software called LOIC to do this and coordinated operations in mIRC. Then the hacker numbers dropped and the sites all went live again.

This got in the news which was quite exciting and lots of people joined in. I stayed up late following the mIRC chat (that bit is legal). Then a 16 year old Dutch boy got arrested for being part of the cyberwar and running LOIC to do dDos attacks as part of Operation Payback.

Then people got scared and the numbers of hackers dropped further, so a new strategy was devised which would allow more people to join in who didn’t want to break the law. This was called Operation Leakspin which asked people to download Wikileaks content and republish it as videos or other media all over the internet so the content couldn’t be destroyed even if Wikileaks websites were all taken down. Good plan! The recruitment poster spoke to ‘Gentlemen’ though, so I made my own version:

This project went live at 9pm EST which was 2AM UK time, hence me being still up at 4am. I’ve made a playlist of all the videos uploaded in so far to the Leakspin campaign. You can keep up on the Leakspin website at http://operationleakspin.org.

In the meantime, the US State Department accidentally republished a Wikileaks document, and then took it down again, inadvertently taking part in Leakspin. Maybe that’s where the inspiration came from. You can see the evidence of this right now by Googling the URL and clicking ‘Quick View’ to see the cache. This will not last forever so look now.

So, if the US State Department is doing it, why not join in?! As far as I know it’s legal to republish content that’s already in the public domain, so go for it. You have to go to the Wikileaks site, download some stuff, read it and find something juicy and re-edit into a new format and re-post somewhere. Ideally YouTube. Post links here to your Leakspin stuff or anyone else’s if you like.

I’ll start: Leakspin // wikileaks // Skinheads and Christian fundamentalists attack Hungarian gay rightsparade July 5, 2008

Let’s see what happens next!

On the issue of whether Femen going topless detracts from the issues they’re trying to get across, I believe that although they are going to get criticised for using the objectification of women as their tool, they are going to get a lot more coverage doing so, and until we sort the system out, it’s fair enough to use the system against itself.

17 May 2010 FEMEN Activist posing topless at Bankovaya St with President of Ukraine sign at the background. Bear scratches symbolize their protest against a pro-Russian politics of Yanukovich that will lead to ruining national interests and influence badly on women.

Leaderboard of body parts / key

I put a bunch of body parts that people looking for porn on the internet are likely to put into Google Search. It only lets you compare five. “porn” itself was way way off the scale, and “vagina” was just below “dick” in terms of popular searches. So, we see that we have “ass” as the number one body part, followed by “tits”. “penis” and “boobs” are tied and “dick” comes last. Interesting.

Has it always been this way? Well, no.

Here we see that over the last couple of years, “ass” has grown in popularity, particularly in the past year, having been much closer to “tits” in 2005-2008. In contrast, “tits” has fallen and if it continues to do so, will be overtaken by “boobs”. “penis” and “dick” have remained relatively stable.

Do worldwide tastes differ? Let’s take a look. Here’s a heatmap of how interests in “ass” have spread across the world in the past five years:

Yes, the country most interested in “ass” is a small African country called Eritrea. Other countries at the top of the interest chart for each word are: “tits” in Canada, “penis” in Papua New Guinea, “boobs” in Pakistan and “dick” in New Zealand.

In related search terms, the top related search for all words was “big whatever” e.g. “big tits”, except “penis” where “big penis” was outdone by “the penis”. Weird.

You can see and play around with all this data yourself on Google Insights for Search here.

Next I should do the same thing for kinky sex acts and see what’s most popular and where. This is fun!

Also if you like this kind of research, you’ll like OKCupid’s blog – OK Trends. It’s great.

The party was at Levi’s flagship store on Regent Street in London. I arrived, wearing Primark jeans and a band t-shirt. Downstairs was a free bar and a bunch of ‘mood boards’ for want of a better term, created by SWTC ambassadors. The discussion was chaired by Annie Mac and the ambassadors included Kathryn Ferguson (filmmaker), Justice Williams (Tru Life magazine), Kristin Knox (fashion blogger), Ikonika (DJ/producer) and Anna Murray & Grace Winteringham (Patternity).

I’d guess that the crowd was 95% female, 95% aged 18-30 and quite racially diverse. It was also 95% stylish and 75% good looking IMO (which is pretty high). Once I’d finished objectifying my sisters, I thought I’d better listen to the discussion. Overall it was quite generic with people saying how important confidence and dedication is, how they don’t like being defined by being female etc. 

Then Jane Bradley one of the organisers of Ladyfest 10 dared to utter the F word. What did our panelists think about Feminism? This caused a wave of nervous giggles and awkward expressions, and one by one the female role models on stage explained that they were not feminists. Patternity said they were women but weren’t working to exclusively help women (as if feminism doesn’t help men?!), and said, “this isn’t a feminist cult!”. At this point the woman in front of me said to her companion, “why are they all so fucking scared of being feminist?”. Hurrah that woman. Out of the six women on stage, only one was brave enough to come out as a feminist. That was Kristin Knox. She then talked about boy bloggers in fashion and mentioned something about gay and straight people that seemed a bit out of context but well done for trying to bring in the subject of sexuality anyway

Overall the discussion was a bit disappointing in its lack of depth or feminist  analysis for me, but it was probably appropriate for the majority of the crowd who seemed to be interested in creative industry entrepreneurship and business rather than women working for social change. In fact, it wasn’t that clear what the ambassadors were doing in the field of social change. They seemed to be successful female role models though, and there was a little discussion about challenges with making money, and the struggles some had gone through financially.

After the talks was more networking time, then a surprise performance from The Noisettes, which was excellent and made me wish I’d brought a proper camera. The event was let down by not having any free wifi that I could find, and uncertainty of what hashtag to use. We also all got a 30% discount voucher for Levi’s which was nice. I had to leave early so missed the DJ set by Ikonika.

So this social network is clearly a branding and CSR endeavour by Levi’s and I’m interested to see how it goes. I met some good people tonight too and I think they got their target audience right. I now want to find out what Levi’s CSR policies are in term of slave labour etc. I know Primark are bad, but my reasoning for shopping there is that it’s better to give £8 to an unethical company than £80 to an equally unethical company for the same thing, when the price isn’t reflective of the workers’ wages anyway. But yeah, I haven’t researched Levi’s practices yet so I won’t pass judgement yet. I probably should have asked that question to the panel.

Some other posts by ladies there on the night, who had actual cameras not just iPhones:
Fashion Fois Gras
A Pair and a Spare
Zaiba Jabbar
Bang Bang You’re Dead

That’s what Think Pig is about – raising awareness of the different farming methods, labelling on meat, and what they mean for pigs. There’s a great educational video and animation for the campaign, a downloadable shopping guide [PDF], and lots of other information on the Think Pig campaign site. Our contribution at NixonMcInnes was to create a Facebook Game and Facebook Page for the campaign. The game is a word game – pigs being so intelligent and all – where you get bonus points for answering facts about pigs and pig welfare correctly. People can then share these facts on their Facebook Wall, and ‘Like’ the Facebook Page to keep informed about the campaign progress and to discuss the issues around pig farming and pig welfare.

There’s been some lively debate on the Facebook Page about whether it’s helpful to promote higher welfare for pigs being farmed for meat, if you don’t agree with eating pigs in the first place. However, even though I don’t eat them myself, I’d rather people were well informed so they could make an educated choice about what (if any) kind of meat they eat.

• Twitalyzer for Tracking Influence and Measuring Success in Twitter
• TweetReach: How Far Did Your Tweet Travel?
• Twit IQ: Twitter client apparently with analytics (but I can’t figure out how to see any decent ones…, but the rest is worth a look)
• Three Mashable articles about measurement and analytics and ROI: July 2008; October 2009; February 2010
• Analyze Words: Twitter Psychology. Also try TweetPsych
• Facebook Analytics: Part II – Vendor Solutions | John Lovett at Web Analytics Demystified
• Follow Finder by Google Looks at who you follow and suggests you other people to follow (Twitter appear to have copied this functionality now)
• Comparing Social Media Monitoring Platforms on Sentiment Analysis about Social Media Week NYC 10

I just made an audible noise of exclamation upon noticing Google Calendar has an updated Favicon

Anyone want to suggest their favourite random/obscure analytics or analysis articles/resources? Aside from the biggies (Google Analytics/Brandwatch/Radian6 etc.)?