I’m pleased with this article because Jonathan got the cooperation of a bunch of advocacy organizations (like the NAACP and Family Research Council) of varying size and asked about how they use social media to advance their organization.  All groups made heavy use of social media, with a strong belief that the technology could help with collective action and informing their constituents.  Groups also had concerns about social media use, including missing some members do to generational/demographic gaps in use, speaking with one voice, and separating personal vs. organizational use of social media.

Here’s the abstract, and the paper is easily found here.  Note the Creative Common License for the article. I love that.

“Can social media promote civic engagement and collective action? Advocacy organizations think so. Obar, Zube, and Lampe surveyed 169 individuals from 53 advocacy groups of diverse interests and sizes and identified a revealing trend. All groups admitted that they use social media technologies to communicate with citizens almost every day. Respondents also believe that social media enable them to accomplish their advocacy and organizational goals across a range of specified activities. The authors note that the relationship between this and real political and ideological change is still speculative, but suggest that future studies can build on their research.”

Here’s the abstract and a copy of the paper.  I’m very happy with this work. I don’t usually do this kind of research method, but I think the integration with previous work on organizational technology adoption along with the case studies comes out as effective at the end of the day. I’d love feedback on this, and to get it into the hands of practitioners to see if it’s useful in thinking about designing social media for their organizations.

“Social media has been widely adopted by organizations in the recent past, and public sector organizations are also showing an increased interest in using this tool to meet their goals. In this paper, we describe three cases of social media adoption by public sector organizations, and the struggles faced in that implementation.  We argue through the experience of implementing these systems that the characteristics of non-profit organizations, including the government and community service organizations that interact in the public sector, exacerbate problems of groupware adoption. In particular, public sector organizations involve multiple stakeholders coordinating in a distributed fashion, which leads to barriers to social media adoption to accomplish their goals.”

Lampe and Roth 2012

SI529 eCommunities

ABS is a widely read journal that is picked p by many different research communities.  Consequently, there’s a great chance to get work read by a broad audience of scholars interested in this area of research.  One goal of this special issue is to highlight both the breadth and depth of the research being conducted in this area.

I’m here in lovely Mountain View California at the WikiSym Conference.  Really nice event, with some great talks you should check out.

Our paper here is:

Online and Offline Interactions in Online Communities
~ W. Mccully, C. Lampe, A. Sreenivasan, A. Velasquez and C. Sarkar

Here’s the abstract:

Online communities, while primarily enacted through technology-mediated environments, can also include offline meetings between members, promoting interactivity and community building. This study explores the offline interactions of online community members and its subsequent impact on online participation. We argue that offline interactions have a counterintuitive impact on online participation. Although these offline interactions strengthen relationships, these relationships undermine the community’s sustainability in terms of site participation. Participation has been defined as contribution of content to the online community. A multi-method analysis technique using content analysis, qualitative interviews, and server level quantitative data of users in Everything2.com supports our claim.

And the paper is (hopefully) WikiSym_2011 McCully et al.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jen White at Michigan Pubic Radio and talk about how technology and social influence affect the distribution and consumption of social media.  A couple of key points I’m glad came out:

- There’s a strong intermingling of media at this point.  Mass media stories are propagated to social media.  Social media messages inform mass media attention.  Both get talked about in “water cooler” conversations.

- Social influence matters.  We adapt the information we’re absorbing from the source we’re receiving it from.

http://michiganradio.org/post/politics-language-part-3

I don’t have great taste in music.

I mean, I have music I like, and music I think is good, but in general I pretty much watch my my friends are listening to, and go with that.  It’s been like this pretty much forever. I think partially, it’s because I don’t listen to music all *that* often.  In the car I listen to news. While working I listen to ambient or classical so I can focus.  I do listen to music at the gym, but I’m heartily sick of my lifting mix and haven’t had the wherewithal to seek out new stuff.

Music choice is an intensely self-presentational thing. I can’t think of many other things that signal “coolness” and cultural literacy more than the types of music one listens to.  People always joke about “guilty pleasure” listening, but we still hang a good portion of our ego on the fantastic choices in music we’ve made.

Recently, I was staying in the same hotel as Nosh Contractor, and he had shared his music file through iTunes.  What are you going to do?  Of course you’re going to listen to Nosh’s music.  And it was fun.  Some great rock tunes, very cool Indian music and some really interesting Chinese music I’d never heard.  I felt like I new more about Nosh after my peek into his music tastes.  When he and I talked about my voyage through his music library the next day, he seemed initially nervous (you could see him reviewing his music list to see if there was anything incriminating in there) but then enjoyed talking about it.

Because I depend on people I think have good taste to discover new music, I had a lot of interest in Spotify.  I’ve been enjoying listening to the music of friends, both those from my research community (Nancy Baym rocks of course) and from my personal friends.  It’s fun, and I’ve been introduced to some new music that can become part of my limited musical scope.

However, with the latest change in the Facebook interface, and my somewhat rash decision to link Spotify and Facebook, each song I was listening to started to be shown in my Friends’ feeds. Some friends posted to my wall with a bit of sarcasm to let me know they didn’t care to see my musical choices that evening.  I was nervous about what I was listening to, whether it betrayed the fact that I’m a supremely uncool listener of music.  In self defense, I started to seek songs from Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and the cast of Glee to turn the whole thing into a joke. Plus I really do like “The Climb”.

Who sees what on Facebook is tough to figure out. It’s a function in the algorithm of how many friends they have, how “close” we are as measured by multiple possible interactions, and what choices I’ve made in applications.  However, plenty of research has shown that people engage in very carefully considered self-presentation strategies in their social network sites profiles.  Most people want to be authentic in their profiles, but “Sunday” authentic where they are presenting a somewhat cleaned up version of themselves.

The unholy combination of Spotify and Facebook take some of the control and transparency out of my self-presentation.  I’m willing to tell folks I have terrible musical taste, but I want to be the one to tell them.