Just for fun, I randomly decided I was going to archive a big pile of old concert flyers from the 80′s when I was growing up in DC and had the privilege of hanging out with the likes of Fugazi at Fort Reno Park.  (Speaking of which, I wrote an homage to them last year, a sort of social media ode. LOL.)

So for archiving purposes, I’ve started a DCpunkrock Tumblr.  If you were around and in the scene then, or have friends who were, I’d be grateful if you would let them know, in case they want to add to the archive. I might need to change the theming so people can upload their own stuff rather than send to me but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Enjoy and please share.  Oh and by the way, if any of you have cool Tumblrs, on any topic, share them in the comments!!  Would love to check them out.

Here’s a followup post by Dan Marom, after he shared some insights last week into his book about the Crowdfunding Revolution.  

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Below is a preview of a chapter I wrote on Crowd Empowered Microfinance in the book Microfinance in Developing Countries, edited by Jean-Paul Gueyie, Ronny Manos, and Jacob Yaron.

Microfinance is a multi-billion dollar industry with a rich history for supporting entrepreneurship and its endeavor to end global poverty. In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of crowdfunding, an industry devoted to supporting entrepreneurship by making capital easier to access through social media and web-based platforms.

Like microfinance, crowdfunding ultimately serves as an alternative to traditional investment mechanisms like banks or venture capital. As both industries are inherently synergistic, I believe crowdfunding can channel its innovative funding mechanisms into the model of microfinance, ultimately benefitting the worlds poor in a more efficient and accessible manner.

Milford Batemen, one of microfinances biggest critics, believes microfinance  diverts resources away from more productive investments and indebts poor people with no significant return, benefits lenders more than the poor, and is inherently anti-developmental. As an alternative to microfinance, Bateman and other academics suggest development at the local level is the most effective means for creating sustainable economic development. Research from the Kauffman Foundation shows in the past 30 years, all net job creation in the U.S. has taken place in firms less than five years old, suggesting funds could be better used by investing in small and medium sized businesses for sustainable growth in local communities. I believe we should take it one step further and look at the role of crowdfunding as a mechanism to support entrepreneurs and small businesses because it will become a catalyst for sustainable growth and employment in developing nations.

One of the central benefits of crowdfunding is social media and web based platforms serve as a modicum for communication, allowing individuals to easily access capital regardless of where they are geographically situated. For individuals in developing nations, crowdfunding is a viable option insofar as the internet and mobile phones allow entrepreneurs to communicate with potential investors without the cost of travel. Through the internet, microfinance increases its depth of outreach, a concept which Kiva.org has demonstrated over the past several years by combining microloans with crowdfunding. While the model is currently loan based, the future could bring equity based models, where investors receive equity for supporting small and medium sized businesses. In addition to funding businesses, investors could also assume more of an entrepreneurial role by becoming part of the business and assuming operational responsibilities. With improved accessibility through mobile phones and social networking, the ease of information sharing will revolutionize not only the way loans are given, but the assumed roles and responsibilities between the lenders and entrepreneurs.

Credit scoring in developing countries has room for improvement, insofar as microfinancinginstitutions face high administrative costs per dollar while lacking economy of scale. Moreover, entrepreneurs and individuals looking to start businesses may not have the established credit history one might find in a developed country. Crowd-sourced credit scoring is one possible solution, whereby the crowd provides ratings for requested loans to gauge whether or not the borrower will be able to return the money to the lender. Crowd-sourced scoring has been extremely effective for eBay and could potentially help overcome asymmetric information and search cost problems associated with developing countries.As crowdfunded microfinance loans tend to be small in value, we should look to mechanisms like exchange-traded funds (ETF) layered by microfinanced institutions. This mechanism would allow individuals to easily provide bigger investments. Currently, MFIs are structured similarly to banks where a small number of individuals own the whole operation. If MFIs were crowd-owned, individuals in developing countries could be partial owners by allowing them to purchase individual shares in a given company, making it in their interest to see the business work and receive money on their investment. Additionally, many microenterprises are not catering to a huge local demand for their product or service. By introducing prepurchasing models into the system via crowdfunding, microenterprises will see additional demand for their product/service, creating a more sustainable business.

The wisdom of the crowd can be further utilized by MFIs bundling crowd-supported financial and non-financial services. For example, microloan borrowers could have access to the wisdom of the crowd through mentoring services, whereby qualified lenders assume the role of mentors to the borrowers. Crowd wisdom provides insight viability of a business model, best practices, and market validation, assets which are non-quantifiable and are crucial for up and coming entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Ending the worlds poverty is no easy feat. While microfinance has done wonders over the past 40 years, I believe we should look to improve lending models by implementing crowdfunding models and mechanisms into the MFIs.

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Dan Marom is an acclaimed author and leading thought leader in the crowdfunding field. In 2010, he co-authored a pioneering book on crowdfunding titled The CrowdFunding Revolution (with Kevin Lawton). A second edition was published by McGraw-Hill in 2012. As a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, Dan’s research focuses on crowdfunding and entrepreneurial finance.

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(photo credit)

I was invited to help design and participate on a panel on “trends in social marketing” last week for the first ever Real Magnet User Group Conference.

No matter what the status of your organization’s social program, you need to know what’s coming over the horizon. Join us for a panel discussion of social marketing experts – from across industries – to discuss what’s next in social marketing and how they’re positioning for it. The panel will address topics like the implications of exploding mobile usage rates, how social is integrated and leverages with other marketing mediums, important technology and behavioral trends and much more.

Each of us had a five minute presentation with three trends each, covering topics like big data, personalization, information overload, and lots more. So I wanted to share my three trends with you. As you know, my work with Lindy is all about helping organizations build the long term capacity for the work of social media management. We’ve seen substantive changes in how organizations are thinking about and implementing social media in the last few years, and I see some very important trends coming down the pike.

1. Convergence and integration.

By convergence, I mean that even though we traditionally come into an organization through one department, whether it’s communications, meetings, marketing, government relations, IT, or anything else (you name it), it becomes very obvious right from the beginning that social media management can’t remain in one silo. But where in the past, we slowly built and worked through centralized processes in order to figure out how to open the doors of communication between departments, we’re now seeing more and more organizations wanting to more proactively decentralize the work from day one. From a marketing perspective, all of your marketing content HAS to come from multiple areas of the organization (every department has a product or service to market or share or communicate about) – and that convergence is where content strategy becomes, well, strategic, and holistic, and everyone is aware of what everyone else wants to communicate. One association we work with has set up what they call a “leveraging committee”, whose job it is to collect information (stories, communications) from multiple departments and figure out how to best leverage it throughout their social media sites but ALSO through their email marketing and main website and print and any other traditional communications vehicles they have.

Integration is my word for the technology side of this coin, the social CRM piece if you will (to use another buzzword) – if organizations have their social media management less silo’ed in one department, that means they have the capacity to pay more attention to those business goals that will drive the success of their social efforts. For associations those business goals will almost always fall into one of four categories: retention, recruitment, outreach, and sales. And in order to know whether your social media work is achieving better retention, more members, more reach or more advocacy, or more registrations, you have to track that data. There will never be one tool that tracks everything (social and marketing and other) – but organizations are realizing that the connection points between different kinds of data matter. And that you have to choose the metrics that apply to the goals you’ve set for any one social activity or campaign in order to know if it’s working. And we’re seeing that becoming a more integrated activity.

2. Social business.

Jamie Notter and I write a lot about social business, but in this context, as a trend, what I’m seeing is a growth in all kinds of collaborative technologies that are NOT about marketing, but about management. About human resources, social HR –Jamie’s paper on changing how you do performance reviews has been insanely popular. About collaborative strategy. About tons of new internal communications tools that break down silos. About new ways to communicate an organization’s culture and brand values and have its staff fully participate in sharing and growing that culture. Social business to me is about the human principles that drive social media seeping into the inside guts of an organization, way beyond just external-facing social media marketing.

3. Social leadership.

Here’s another big trend I’m seeing – a lot of interest (and data to support it, including our own) from the C-suite in what it means to be a social leader (and it’s not necessarily having to be all over Twitter all day). It’s also about supporting social principles in your organization, being the champion for the culture changes that becoming a social business requires. I talked about this recently after I did a presentation for a client on the topic, and as a result of demand I’m expanding the talk into a full webinar that Jamie will join me on – more details will be forthcoming. But the bottom line is, once the C-suite starts to take notice, that means something.

Do these resonate? What trends are you seeing?

————— (photo credit) This post contains a slide deck. It’s short and sweet but click through if you’d like to see it.

“Education is not a mechanical system, it’s a human system.” AMEN.

“Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational “death valley” we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.”

Direct link is here.

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This post contains an amazing TED talk. Please click through to watch it.

Our friend Danielle Brigida at the National Wildlife Federation recently posted this Quarterly Update about their recent social media successes. Do you do this for your org? Great idea!

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(photo credit)

A key characteristic of a truly social business is trust. If you want to fully leverage the power of social media, then you need to trust people–your staff, your members, your stakeholders–because you can’t do social well while maintaining an iron fist of control. It just doesn’t work that way. But if you’re having any success in social media, you’ve probably already discovered the payoff of trust in the form of engagement, volunteer effort, word of mouth marketing, and a stronger brand. Trust is powerful. It enables speed. It facilitates action. Maddie and I have Trustworthy as one of our four human elements in Humanize. It’s that central to what it means to be human.

So given its power, why is trusting such a difficult thing to do, particularly for “leaders?” People at the top seem to need a lot of convincing to trust people. Maybe they’ll start with a little test…a small area where they can dole out a teeny bit of trust to see if it works. Once they see that the other person or group isn’t going to screw up, then they’ll release a little more trust.

There’s a problem with this approach. While it is, generally, okay to be incremental in trust development (trust needn’t be an either/or, complete/none proposition), frequently these “trust tests” are bogus. The leaders are letting other people do things, but internally they are, in fact, fairly confident it won’t work. And when they are let down, they are quick to say “I told you so”. That’s known as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you’re the leader and let me do something (but secretly expect me to fail), I typically feel that, and it makes it harder for me to succeed. Real trust is not only about taking a risk–it’s about taking it confidently. I think our leaders need to understand that more. It’s not just about appearing to trust. There’s internal work you need to do as well.

So it was with interest that I read a column by Vineet Nayar in this month’s Harvard Business Review. He is the CEO of HCL Technologies, a large company in India. He talks about trusting his younger employees, and really giving them responsibility. But here’s the rub: he doesn’t have a choice. Nearly half of India’s population is under the age of 25. That’s more than 500 million people. In the U.S. that figure is only 33%. Our median age is 37, and India’s is 26.5. According to Nayar, the average age of his 87,000 employees is only 28. In order to do right by his customers, he argues that it’s impossible to put the big decisions all in the hands of veteran employees. He needs those Millennials to take initiative, not just direction. This means they need to be deeply engaged. This requires the real trust I am talking about:

Real engagement in the work itself comes as a result of the trust you place in employees to take the right action using the resources at their disposal. When decisions are made by senior executives far from the front line, it is little wonder that Gen Y workers are unenthusiastic about implementing them! Give them the power to quickly initiate and implement innovative ideas, and engagement will follow.

So, what is the job of leaders and managers in this scenario? Get ready managers:

Managers should exist to support the energetic efforts of young workers, enabling and coaching rather than deciding and directing. They should provide greater access to knowledge and collaborative networks. They should make it easy for employees to build horizontal networks that span organizational boundaries and tap diverse areas of expertise. They should enable employees to temporarily step out of formal lines of management and join forces more fluidly to respond to market opportunities.

In short, they need to manage a more human organization. Decentralization, transparency, relationship building (with networks), ownership, inclusion, systems thinking. And what I like even more is that his managers are held accountable to this work, and every single employee had access to the 360 appraisals that were done on every single senior  manager.

The percentage of his workforce that is young has reached a point where he sees the value in doing it this way. That hasn’t happened in the U.S., but if the baby boomers do ever retire, it most certainly will. The Millennials are the largest generation in U.S. history, and most of them are still not yet in the workforce. If we want to tap into their collective (and immense) power, we’re going to have to teach ourselves a new way of running our organizations.

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(Photo credit)

This is a guest post from Dan Marom, co-author of The Crowdfunding Revolution. In this series of posts about social media books, I invite the author to share something about themselves and why they wrote the book, and what in the book might be of particular interest to association or nonprofit audiences.  

Maddie’s Take: I am FASCINATED by the disruptive power of crowdfunding and its sister field, social lending [I've been looking into sites like Lending Club and participating in Kiva - anyone expert in the field want to write me a post about those?] so  I find this book incredibly interesting.  And with a description like this– “This groundbreaking guide explains how the explosive growth of connectivity is obviating human-to-human networks and centralized planning of capital allocation—and describes how crowdfunding can be used to tap into a “collective intelligence” for far superior results.” –which feeds my Humanize-ing obsession, how could I not recommend this?   More: “Organic. Transparent. Decentralized. This is crowdfunding. This is the future.” OH YES.
Verdict (Buy, Borrow, Skim, Pass?): BUY – it’s awesome.

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Social innovation refers to new strategies, concepts, ideas and organizations that meet social needs of all kinds — from working conditions and education to community development and health — and that extend and strengthen civil society. Social media and the internet has been a big supporter of social innovation over the past couple of years, witnessing the creation of powerful virtual communities dedicated to a particular cause or initiative. We’ve seen the power of these communities in action, ranging from the Arab Spring and political uprisings and protests in the Middle East to animal-lovers intercepting a truck carrying 1500 dogs bound for a slaughterhouse in China. Social networks create a new kind of access, where individuals in disparate geographical areas can come together in pursuit of a particular goal.

Humans are social and emotional creatures and are intrinsically drawn to goals and pursuits to whom they feel connected to. That is how social innovation is actualized. For social innovation, tools like Twitter and Facebook can fastrack an idea or concept to fruition by pooling together ideas and resources from a large group of people. Yet often times, ideas and resources need money to come to fruition. This is where crowdfunding becomes an agent for change, democratizing  social innovation and change by giving individuals the opportunity to put forth small donations for a cause they believe in. The beauty of this model is that it can be applied to almost any cause or industry.

Over the past year, we have seen forward-thinking individuals create crowdfunding platforms and projects in pursuit of solving a social problem and moving society forward. In the next few minutes, I will highlight a few notable projects and platforms where individuals have harnessed the power of the crowd to bring about social change and innovation.

Civic and Community Projects

For social innovation at the civic level, crowdfunding helps engage citizens in public discourse to understand what initiatives are important to them. I believe civic crowdfunding will play an important role in the public sector, allowing individuals to directly engage with municipalities and support civic engagement. This is particularly important because it allows citizens to not only invest in their communities, but they can also volunteer time and other resources to a cause that will help their friends and neighbors at the local level.

By sourcing ideas from their citizens, the public and private sector can ensure all the issues important to their citizens are being addressed and potentially can match or donate funds towards specific projects. Crowdfunding is one of the most viable alternatives for financing urban projects, insofar as members of the community can become drivers for change when the government does not have the available resources.

One of the best examples comes from the UK crowdfunding platform Spacehive where a cash-strapped community was having trouble raising money for a community center. The goal of the project was to reverse the cycle of deprivation in the town by building a central hub for a learning programme four days per week, enterprise workshops, nightly events for children and young people, luncheon clubs for older people; community fitness sessions, and social parties. Through a crowdfunding campaign on Spacehive, the center raised £792,021 for the construction, furnishing, decoration, and landscaping of the center. This is an excellent example of the potential for communities to come together and pool their time and resources to solve an issue they care about. We are seeing these types of programs in a global scale, with crowdfunding platforms like Neighbor.ly facilitating civic and community projects to propel society forward. At the community level, crowdfunding will be a great way to support local businesses and entrepreneurship because everyone in the community has a shared interest of making it a better place.

Microfinance

One of the central benefits of crowdfunding is social media and web based platforms serve as a modicum for communication, allowing individuals to easily access capital regardless of where they are geographically situated. For individuals in developing nations, crowdfunding is a viable option insofar as the internet and mobile phones allow entrepreneurs to communicate with potential investors without the cost of travel. Through the internet, microfinance increases its depth of outreach, a concept which Kiva.org has demonstrated over the past several years by combining microloans with crowdfunding. While the model is currently loan based, the future could bring equity based models, where investors receive equity for supporting small and medium sized businesses. In addition to funding businesses, investors could also assume more of an entrepreneurial role by becoming part of the business and assuming operational responsibilities. With improved accessibility through mobile phones and social networking, the ease of information sharing will revolutionize not only the way loans are given, but the assumed roles and responsibilities between the lenders and entrepreneurs.

Charitable Giving

For charities around the world, the next few years will witness the democratization of philanthropy. Rather than donating a check to a large-scale charity or foundation where senior executives are pulling in six-figure salaries, donors will have a better understanding of exactly where their money is going and for what purpose. Research shows that individuals who already follow particular charities on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter are likely to discuss the charity with friends and family, calling upon the power of the crowd to reach more potential donors, but also supplying those donors with information sources about the cause and how that money is going to be used. Research from Harris Interactive also indicates that many people feel a sense of “personal responsibility” for making the world a better place. Donation-based crowdfunding satisfies that sense of personal responsibility by allowing individuals to understand precisely how their donated funds will be used.

Crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo and Donate.ly offer charities and foundations an opportunity to discuss their cause, talk about how the money will be used, and even offer rewards and perks for donating. While we know charitable giving fulfills intrinsic desires to help others, utilizing perks and rewards systems is an effective way for inspiring individuals to give on a more frequent basis.

Moving forward, I believe 2013 will be a great opportunity for all people (whether you be a volunteer, entrepreneur, potential investor, policymaker, or donor) to explore the ways crowdfunding can move our societal goals forward. As crowdfunding becomes more commonplace as a fundraising mechanism, we will all be presented with opportunities to help each other and the world. Take advantage and learn how you can help. And above all, engage!

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Dan Marom is an acclaimed author and leading thought leader in the crowdfunding field. In 2010, he co-authored a pioneering book on crowdfunding titled The CrowdFunding Revolution (with Kevin Lawton). A second edition was published by McGraw-Hill in 2012. As a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, Dan’s research focuses on crowdfunding and entrepreneurial finance.

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(photo credit)

Join me for a webinar about winning community management strategies, hosted by Higher Logic on Thursday May 16 at 2 pm ET.  We all know launching a private social network is much easier than developing an actual community of participants who are connected, active and engaged.  I’ll help you gather the materials you need to start sparking interest and activity within your private online community.

In this session, you’ll:

• Learn community management strategies that make your community a productive and comfortable place for members to participate.
• See how content can attract members, generate discussion, and keep members active and interested.
• Get a better idea of what success looks like for association communities, and what metrics are worth benchmarking and tracking.

REGISTER NOW.

I’ll be sharing just a few of the strategies we discussed in our Private Community Management Certificate Program.  Interested in learning much more about community management?  Get on the waiting list here!

See message on Tweetchat here.

Follow @Tweetchat on Twitter for the latest. Right now, we have no further information, but according to tweets this may affect other chat applications as well.  ETA for shutdown, according to @Tweetchat, is June 11.

@l2myowndevices @patricksplace we did not pull our service. Twitter is changing how users can access data making our service unfeasible.

— TweetChat (@TweetChat) May 5, 2013

UPDATE #1 – not really an update, but more in the comments here.

UPDATE #2 – Try SmartStream – possible replacement