Mr Splashy Pants / Greenpeace.org

Mister Splashy Pants, a whale named after Greenpeace held a naming competition in 2007 doesn’t seem to be news, but Alexis Ohanian, who is a founder of Reddit tells a great story at TED (in 3 minutes no less!) of how social media created a meme, took Greenpeace by surprise, won the competition, Greenpeace ceded control and in the end saved whales, literally.

The example shows one way for establish organizations to work with social media: Loosen up and go with the flow. Make the most of the situation and the attention. You need to give something up to gain people’s trust and participation. This is something that corporations and non-profits alike are mortally afraid to do.

Organizations are afraid of losing control over their message. But what is brand identity anyway? Isn’t it something that forms in the minds of the customers and participants? And it’s hard to control what people think of you. Individuals are constantly making adjustments to accommodate, influence or reject the way they are perceived by others. But it’s an ongoing relationship, not one-way. The more social we get in the use of internet technologies, the more relationship-oriented things will be.

So it’s not ok to find new ways to do old things, like one-way communication. Embrace participation. Lose some control. It’s ok. If a serious organization like Greenpeace can have some fun, other can too.

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See also: Wikipedia entry

Continuing on my TED kick, in case you missed it, here’s an inspiring talk given by Katherine Fulton in 2007 on how philanthropies need to change, entitled You are the future of philanthropy.

It’s easy to criticize charities and foundations as being dinosaurs from another era, limited in funding, reach and risk. I was very surprised to learn that this was not the case at the turn of the century when philanthropies were emerging to solve the pressing social issues of that time.

Katherine talks about five categories of experiments, each of which challenges an old assumption of philanthropy and pave the path for philanthropies to adapt to today’s environment and social challenges:

• Mass collaboration: think Wikipedia
• Online philanthropy marketplaces: think DonorsChoose.org
• Aggregated giving: think Warren Buffet and how he didn’t start his own foundation.
• Innovation competitions: think X Prize
• Social investing: think xigi.net

… what’s really interesting here is that we’re not thinking our way into a new way of acting. We’re acting our way into a new way of thinking. Philanthropy is reorganizing itself before our very eyes. And even though all of the experiments and all of the big givers don’t yet fulfill this aspiration, I think this is the new zeitgeist: open, big, fast, connected. And, let us also hope, long.

She also has a report on the future of philanthropy called Looking out for the future.

Clay Shirky, TED@State, June 2009

I’ve recently been reading Clay Shirky’s 2008 book Here Comes Everybody and found he gave a talk at TED@State last month, hosted at the State Department in Washington DC .

He talks about how rules have change in the games of communication. Where before the internet, organizations would send the same message to everyone they are trying to reach. But all that has changed. Not only are they talking about but they are talking to each other about you:

We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global. social, ubiquitous and cheap. Now most organizations that are trying to send messages to the outside world, to the distributed collection of the audience, are now used to this change. The audience can talk back. And that’s a little freaky. But you can get used to it after a while, as people do.

But that’s not the really crazy change that we’re living in the middle of. The really crazy change is here. It’s the fact that they are no longer disconnected from each other. The fact that former consumers are now producers.

There is an additional Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran (June 16, 2009):

I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.

Here’s Clay talking at TED2005 on Institutions vs. Collaboration, which interestingly is before the rise of Twitter as the communication tool of choice.