Note: I removed about a dozen responses that stated ownership of more than 500 mobile phones. While this is probably feasible, it was a small minority and skewed my results too much.

Comments by User Gender While expecting a male bias, I didn’t expect it to be so one-sided. I’m interested to know if the page demographics are similarly skewed.	Comments by Locale Facebook doesn’t provide location for un-authenticated requests. Fortunately, locale is a useful proxy. (EN includes US and GB)
Comments by Sentiment This measures the sentiment toward HTC and their products, not the sentiment of the comment. The sentiment was reviewed manually, so the accuracy is quite high. However, the small sample-size should discourage reading too much into this set of results.

The process for this was actually quite straight-forward. First I used the Facebook Graph API to download all the comments into a database. Because I didn’t want to manually review 2000 comments, my first pass automatically checked for comments containing only numbers. This took only a few minutes to code and knocked out 400 comments.

I then selected very short messages with the assumption that they were just numerical answers with punctuation. This proved prescient since many people noted the number of phones they’d owned and appended smiley faces. This took care of another 250 or so messages. To review the final set, I coded a small web application to manually step through each comment. Through this application I could also note the comment sentiment, past and current phones, and other facets. After some refinement to the app, I was able to review about a dozen messages a minute and complete the entire review in less than two hours.

I looked at several other Facebook posts with a large number of comments, but choose this one because many of the answers would be uniquely easy to automatically parse. If the question required a prose response, the analysis would need to be done more manually, which would be quite time-consuming. Crowd sourcing could provide a solution, perhaps through something like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Because I coded the web application solely for this topic, I was able to very specific in my search parameters, which allowed for some interesting insights. For example, it was fascinating to see people’s ownership history (especially how their brand-loyalty has evolved over time). Similar analysis using an off-the-shelf tool (Sysomos, Radian 6, etc) would not have provided this level of customization and granularity.

After mapping the best-networked DC Twitter technorati, I figured I’d try it out on an environment I’m not familiar with: Seattle.

The results

Here are the results of the best-networked Seattle tech Twitter users:

Shauna Causey, who manages social media at Nordstrom, ranks the highest, by quite a margin over second-placed Monica Guzman, a tech journalist. Unsurprisingly, Bill Gates, perhaps the world’s foremost geek (and I use that approvingly), ranks highly in third. Two broadcast journalists, Jenni Hogan and Linda Thomas, follow-up in forth and fifth. Kevin Urie, founder of Social Media Club Seattle, ranks sixth.

Rounding out the top ten are: Brian Crouch (7th), social media manager for the Music Group; Chris Pirillo (8th), a social media strategist; Jeff Shuey (9th), board member of the Seattle Social Media Club; and, finally, Lily Jang (10th), a local TV anchor.

For the methodology and additional information, check out the post I did on my DC analysis.

A few notes

• This analysis mapped 1910 individual Twitter accounts, resulting in 4.2 1.4 million relationships to crunch. Interestingly, this is fewer accounts than the DC analysis (2700 accounts), but more than twice as many relationships (1.9 million) Check out the update below.
• There were more local journalists in my Seattle results, likely due to the wider network of relationships indexed as compared to the DC analysis. I debated removing these accounts to focus just on people self-identified as involved in the tech scene, but I didn’t want to adjust the results too much.
• There were a good number of “institutional” Twitter accounts that I filtered out. Check out the complete list of results to see how they scored.
• It’s interesting to see how well Kevin Urie was ranked. Despite having a relatively small following, he was very well connected within this network, no doubt through his work with the Seattle SMC.
• Oh, and why Seattle? My girlfriend is working there and can help validate the results.

Know the Seattle tech scene well? How do my results look to you? Anyone I missed?

Seattle skyline photograph by Bala

After mulling this over, I figured a good measure of potential influence would be how well networked a person is in a particular topical environment. To test this hypothesis I decided to look at an area I know pretty well: the Washington DC tech scene. Since I already have a good sense of this community, I could verify the analytical results from my own knowledge.

The Results

After doing my analysis, here is my ranking of the top ten most networked individuals:

Overall, this squares pretty well with my knowledge of this community. Number one, @corbett3000, belongs to none other than Peter Corbett, the CEO of iStrategyLabs, a leading DC technology firm and organizer of many DC tech conferences (including the upcoming 10-day DC tech festival). Coming in second is Shana Glickfield, who goes by @dcconcierge, and is DC’s consummate networker and FOMO sufferer. Rounding out the top three is Frank Gruber, @frankgruber, CEO of TechCocktail.com. Number four is every one’s favorite Microsoft staffer, Mark Drapeau who tweets at @cheeky_geeky.

It is particularly interesting to see how a large Twitter following does not necessary translate into a significant number of relationships within this particular network.

For kicks, I threw the top forty accounts into NodeXL to see what the network looks like:

Network of the top forty DC Twitter technorati. Each line represents a single follower-followed relationship. It is interesting to see which accounts are more central within this small network and which are more peripheral.

Methodology

And the big question: how did I arrive at these results? Here is the process I used:

1. My starting point was trying to figure out how to measure the number of connections within a particular geographic region and subject area. For this, I needed a good index of who was active in the DC tech sphere on Twitter. Fortunately, this part of the job has been done by the community in the form of Twitter lists. I trolled through a large selection of Twitter lists looking for ones that had “DC” and either “social media” or “technology” and entered those info my database.
2. I then went through each list and saved all the individual accounts on that list.
3. From the users on these lists, I ended up with a database of about 2700 Twitter accounts that, through the Twitter lists, were related to the DC tech scene.
4. In the most time-consuming part of the analysis, I set-up a system to download all the people these Twitter accounts followed. Since a follow is an expression of interest in the followed account, I counted that as a “vote”. This is much the same way Google considers a link a vote of confidence in the linked page.
5. After a few days of downloading data from Twitter, I had a database of nearly 2 million follower-to-followed relationships. Using this index, I checked which accounts were most frequently followed and ranked them according.
6. I was able to automate nearly every set after selecting the Twitter lists, but the final step requires a good deal of “eyes on screen”. The final list included a number of very widely followed accounts, but not ones I was interested in. Since I was only focusing on individuals in DC, I removed a lot of institutions and people outside of the city. For example, the top three @mashable, @barackobama, and @techcrunch are all widely followed, but not members of the DC tech scene. As such, I excluded these from the final results. (It is interesting that Mashable has a much wider following in DC than Techcrunch. I imagine if I was looking at Silicon Valley the ranking would be inverted.)

I was able to automate most of the above steps using a small app I coded, so much of the data collection took place while I was fast asleep in bed. Due to Twitter API data call limits, most of this was done using automated CRON jobs. Steps 1 and 6 though were not automated and required diligently going through the data.

Final Thoughts

So that’s it? Certainly not, this only measures who is widely followed within this topical subset, not who is actually influential. You’d need to combine this with other measures (frequency of retweets, ability to drive conversations, and so on) to get real sense of influence.

Fortunately the results do square pretty well with my understanding of the DC tech scene, which helps validate the approach. Most likely I’ll do some more playing around with this technique, so stay tuned.

“It’s an honor to welcome the first american president that looks brazilian!! :)”

Those words of welcome, from Fred in Brasilia, joined about 30,000 more messages for President Obama as he made his first visit to Brazil this past March. To help celebrate the president’s visit, we helped the United States Embassy in Brasilia develop “Boas-vindas Presidente Obama”, a social media campaign to raise interest in the president’s visit.

A major objective of this program was to help Brazilians engage with the President’s visit beyond the handful of public events and the usual TV coverage. Brazil is a continent-sized nation with more than 190 million people, so the opportunities for Brazilians to actively participate were unfortunately limited. Social media provided a solution. ?The visit also provided an opportunity to increase mutual understanding and further dialogue with Brazilians on priority themes (such as education, the environment, clean energy, global partnerships, and other topics).

The concept was simple: create a campaign driven by social media where Brazilians could submit short welcome messages to President Obama. These were collected in two mediums: short text messages and 15 second videos recorded through the participant’s web cams. The text messages were gathered through a custom-built application we designed and developed within the State Department. On the video side, we turned to VideoGenie, a web start-up.

The welcome campaign micro-site.

Since the Brazilian social networking landscape is quite diverse, we utilized a wide variety of platforms to get the word out and to collect welcome messages. A key goal was to increase the size of US Embassy Brasilia’s communities on Facebook and Orkut pages. For Facebook we created an application housed within the fan page. This allowed us to integrate our Facebook efforts and direct Facebook advertising to both the fan page and application. Orkut doesn’t provide an application framework for their brand channel, so we created a microsite at www.obamabr.org. This also gave us added flexibility on the design and content that wasn’t feasible within Facebook.

We also integrated the various social sharing tools, primarily Facebook and Twitter buttons, to help encourage people to share the wider program, but also, importantly, the individual messages they recorded. This made it easier to track how many mentions we had on the various social networks.

The messages came in from all across Brazil, from small hamlets in the Amazon to the bustling metropolises of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. As Fred’s welcome suggests, Obama’s story resonates personally with many in Brazil’s diverse population of 190 million people. The program also demonstrated the warmth and hospitality of the Brazilian people. Indeed, many people invited Obama to their houses to join their families for dinner.

The welcome campaign Facebook application showing the live video feed of a press conference.

The Tech

My role was primarily as the design and development lead, with the help of our developer Jeff Hunter. I also provided strategy advice based on the past presidential trips I’ve supported.

In a single hectic week we developed and soft-launched the application, microsite, and a backend system to moderate the incoming messages. Throughout the next two weeks leading up to the visit we continually made improvements and added features, with a particular emphasis on bringing more people to the embassy’s Facebook page.

The site was coded in PHP using the brilliant PHP-framework CodeIgniter. Without a doubt we could not have launched as quickly as we did without the aid of this framework. When we started to get significant press coverage and traffic spiked, the built-in caching functionality of CodeIgniter was a server-saver.

A few stats

The fan base of the embassy page increased from about 2,300 to 21,800 at the end of the program, an increase of about 19,500. This increase was partly driven by Facebook advertising, but much of the growth was due to the welcome message campaign.

More than 32,000 welcome messages were received from dozens of cities and towns across Brazil. Of the collected messages, about 500 were videos, with the remainder text only. Following the visit, about 1,500 reactions to the visit were also collected. The Facebook application and microsite together received about 160,000 visits over the three weeks the program was live.

Daily totals of incoming messages from the 11th through the 23rd of March 2011.

The campaign also received significant media by prominent Brazilian outlets. Estadao, the second largest paper in Sao Paulo by subscribers, prominently featured an article about the campaign. The campaign was also featured by: Gizmodo Brazil, TV Globo’s G1 Political web site, R7 Noticias, and MacMagazine, and several others.

Also, I would be remiss if I did not thank the staff at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, and particularly the Information Resource Center. They really made this event happen. If you are interested in more events like this or to follow their work, I suggest checking out the Facebook pages for the U.S. Embassy Cairo and the Information Resource Center.

Faculty of Mass-Communications

Faculty of Economics and Political Science

Fortunately, I received a reminder of the importance of in-person public diplomacy earlier this week. As part of my trip across the Middle East, I gave many public presentations on how social media is used by the United States government in our public diplomacy efforts. I’d done this in the West Bank, Amman, and finally in Cairo.

Presentation to the Faculty of Media and Communication, Cairo University

This past Tuesday I spoke to the faculty and students of Cairo University’s Faculty of Mass-Communications and the Faculty of Economics and Political Science. Here is the presentation I used (PPTX). I can say, without a doubt, they asked some of the most challenging questions I’ve received about social media. Their interests were wide and varied. They asked about the risks that social media could detach us from our real-world lives, the use of these tools by the Egyptian government, the role of social media in the release of Iraq war documents on Wikileaks, and much more.

Opinions were also quite diverse. Several individuals asked pointed questions about U.S. government control of the media. As the recent mid-term elections and the ever-shifting popularity of American policies demonstrate, we operate in a very challenging media landscape in which we often have little power to control the message. As I noted in the discussion, if the U.S. government is so good at this, they wouldn’t need me!

A professor of the Faculty of Media and Communications

Conversely, the Wikileaks questions often focused on how the U.S. government is quite powerless to control even its own information. Unfortunately, since this isn’t an area I focus on I feel I wasn’t able to sufficiently address the questions. If you’re interested in the Wikileaks Iraq documents story the New York Times has a great special feature on the subject.

In addition to the challenging discussion, I was also very impressed with how Egyptians are using social media to improve their society. One project is using social media and online maps to combat sexual harassment. Another campaign uses these tools to help keep Alexandria clean, an effort that has gotten widespread media attention and compelled the local government to act. Others are using social media to create connections between ordinary Americans and Egyptians to correct stereotypes and improve relations.

The past three weeks have been a whirlwind of activity: events, interviews, chats over tea, seeing astonishing landscapes, experiencing remarkable history, and so much more. However, it is the friendships that were started that I find most important. And, naturally, we’ll be continuing these friendships over social media until my return!

The main square in Ramallah, on the boundary with Ramallah's sister city, El-Bireh.

Some days it feels like I have the best job in the world. This week I had one of those days. For the past several days I’ve been working with our Embassy in Tel Aviv and Consulate General in Jerusalem on their public diplomacy social media programs. This focuses mostly on sharing best practices from other missions, providing suggestions on enhancements, and helping to create a structured approach to their public engagement. This work has been great, fun, and very illuminating. I’m constantly amazed how much our missions are able to do with limited resources and even less time.

But that isn’t all that made the day so remarkable. What made the day so noteworthy was the opportunity to chat with Palestinian social media leaders. The Arabic Media Internet Network (AMIN) hosted an in-person session with bloggers and practitioners in the West Bank city of Ramallah and a second video conference with bloggers in Gaza.

Merely visiting Ramallah is worth noting on its own. This sounds strange to say, but it seems a very “normal” place. The perception you get of the West Bank is a desperate population riven and cut-off by strife. News images focus on thrown rocks and wire-topped walls. Instead there are bustling streets, car dealerships (including a gleaming Mercedes dealer), and new five-star hotels. The most incongruous feeling was the security detail we are required to have on official visits. It made me feel alien to the outside. I imagine the feeling is mutual when locals see our imposing truck hurtling by.

Discussing social media with Palestinian activists, professors, and students.

Image by U.S. Consulate General Jerusalem

As an outsider, this normality hides the precariousness of the current situation. I was told stories of humiliations at checkpoints, the daily hassles of stateless-citizens, and families and friends separated by ever-shifting lines. Jerusalem itself is a city of walls. They separate the old from the new, east from west, and a troubled past from an uncertain future.

Yet there are uplifting stories as well, of tireless videographers showing the real lives of Palestinian women, bloggers working to build bridges between separated people, businessmen creating new opportunities, journalists dedicated to openness and transparency, and photographers sharing the beauty of the landscape and her people. They are using new media to tell their stories, as only they can. While the sessions were billed as a chance to learn from the work we’re doing in the State Department, we have much to learn from them.

With luck I will be back in the near future. Until then, there’s always social media to keep us connected!

Recently I had the pleasure to participate in the Public Media Camp, an unconference focused on strengthening local and national public broadcasting. A good portion of the discussion focused on the disruptive and new opportunities being presented by Internet-based dissemination and social media.

Of Hubs and Spokes

While the focus on social media related well to my work in public diplomacy, the very structure of public media actually seems quite similar to the hub and spoke model of the central State Department in Washington and the various embassies, consulates and missions scattered around the world. As with public broadcasting, content is produced and disseminated in Washington and the very diverse missions overseas. Just as NPR or PBS in Washington balances the needs of their direct national audience with the needs of their affiliate stations, the State Department also has to support an international audience for its America.gov properties while meeting overseas mission needs.

Additionally, most public media outlets focus more on informing audiences and social change than increasing profits. Public diplomacy has similar goals: changing perceptions about the United States’ and its policies and creating a better environment for U.S. goals, such as democratization, improving religious freedoms and so on. Without profits as a baseline metric, both organizations aim for more intangible goals, such as those elucidated above. This makes measurement more challenging, with related knock-on effects.

Measuring Impact

Fortunately, public media and affiliated organizations are taking on a number of these challenges, most especially measurement. The Fledgling Fund, an NGO focused on helping social change projects get off the ground, has done quite a bit of work figuring out how to measure such an amorphous goal as creating social impact. Drawing from their experience, they’ve created a five-stage model which helps measure social impact of a program.

Here are the steps (scroll down for a diagram):

1. Media quality: Most basically, this stage asks if the subject is a quality piece of media? Are the characters strong and well defined? Is the story well-toned? Will it get press attention, resonate with viewers, generate online buzz and so on?
2. Raising public awareness: Where is the topic in the public consciousness? Some topics don’t need more more widespread attention, so media focused solely on raising awareness isn’t necessary. However, some topics are not well known, so a basic introduction or media focused on moving beyond the choir may be necessary.
3. Increased public engagement: There is the largest leap in the five stages, moving from awareness to engagement. Essentially, this is the leap from passive attention (viewing a film, reading a web site) to active engagement (promoting the film to friends, commenting on a web site). Reaching this state indicates a change in attitudes, beliefs and behaviors.
4. Stronger social movement: At this stage, people have moved from low level engagement to greater collective action. If the media engaged the choir, then they’ve become more creative or effective after engaging with your media. If the media reached new audiences, then they’ve joined existing organizations or created their own to reach the goals elucidated in your media.
5. Social change: This is the ultimate goal and, often, the most difficult to reach. At this stage the media has encouraged policy or legislative change, a tangible shift in the public dialog on the topic or influential changes in citizen or consumer behavior.

This model seems to suit public diplomacy media efforts well, though it would require some time spent on teasing out the specific measures, qualitative and quantitative, for each step. The Fledgling Fund has a good whitepaper on the model (PDF) that delves much deeper while also providing some useful real-world case studies.

There were a few more gems from the public media camp that I hope to write-up in the next week or so.

Recently I attended the Politics Online Conference put on by George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. Although I was only able to sit in on a handful of sessions, there were a number of very useful gems on how you can use social media to further political campaign goals. I’ve focused on the lessons most useful for public diplomacy campaigns.

One of the major themes of the conference is the necessity to create authentic engagement when using social media. Without creating this authenticity, it is much more difficult to influence the intended audience since there is little personal connection with the message. Many lobbyists regularly emphasized that a handful of authentic, personal messages from constituents are more convincing than a mass quantity of relatively anonymous messages. Furthermore, genuine engagement between two parties (in this case politicians and constituents) can help create lasting communities and movements centered around specific causes, even if the engagement is conducted online.

Ideally this authenticity is created through direct personal engagement, a local focus and a tangible result. One example given was a campaign to influence legislation covering local food producers. To highlight the importance of these producers in local constituencies, a lobbyist organization used an online campaign to help local producers deliver care packages of non-perishable goods to their representatives. By using web-based technologies to make the constituent’s concerns tangible, the lobbyists were able to influence the final legislation to greater benefit local producers.

Many of the presenters also cautioned that campaigns can’t simply present themselves as grassroots and authentic, without actually engaging real people in the effort. Web users have gotten increasingly sophisticated and can often easily spot fake campaigns (otherwise known as “astroturfing”, a play on real “grassroots”). If a fake campaign is spotted, the repercussions can be serious and severely damage the credibility of the sponsoring organization.

A few other tips I found useful:

• If you can’t create your own parade, get in front of one. This was in response to a question asking if you didn’t have Obama, or a similarly motivational individual or cause, what can be done to get more attention to your campaign. One great suggestion was to track trends and get in front of ones that relate to your effort. This means it is important to track trends, such as through Twitter or Google, and see which ones are getting more attention. When adding related photos, Tweets, blog posts and so on, be sure to find out what tags are being used and label your content as such. For example, one of the sites I work on had put together a wealth of information on avian flu, pandemics, global health care and so on. While many of that was off the radar for many months, with the recent spread of H1N1, much of this content is now highly relevant to the global conversation on swine flu. As many have said before, “never waste a good crisis”.
• No media works in a vacuum. In basically every media market, no single form of media functions without at least some relation to other types. Newspapers influence TV and vise versa, while a scandal might break on Twitter or Facebook before making it to the nightly news broadcast. As such, you have to consider all dominant (and perhaps some not so dominant) media channels in your engagement programs. Ideally, all media campaigns should have integrated components across many forms of media, each tailored to the medium’s specific requirements. It is no longer possible to see a campaign as strictly a TV commercial, since that commercial may be recorded on a mobile phone, reposted on YouTube and then shared via Twitter. For that same reason, it is also important to monitor a wide variety of media for mentions, even if there isn’t any specific engagement taking place in them.
• Meeting in person is still – and always will be – the most influential type of engagement. It is far harder to be inauthentic, impersonal and non-transparent when meeting face to face. The sheer amount of information conveyed in the tone of a person’s voice, the way they present themselves and the messages they convey in the meeting makes personal connections far more moving than any other type of connection. As one presenter put it, “There is no substitute for a personal meeting with a member of congress.”