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KONY 2012 and the Age of Online Activism

The KONY 2012 campaign is a great example of how people can come together to raise awareness on an important topic.

I work for a labor organization and a great deal of the work we do is tied to feet on the street. We organize people and money for the benefit of our members and society. When it comes to doing online activism, this is still something that is new in the social justice arena.

Yes, it’s easy enough to create a Facebook page or a Twitter page and send out an email now an then. But those types of efforts rarely have a major impact when they are done as items on a check off list and not as a significant and urgent component of a campaign. The KONY 2012 campaign does just that.

The KONY 2012 campaign includes a strong narrative in regards to the devastating effects of children being recruited into a personal army and it uses new media to help get the message out. At the time of this post, the KONY 2012 video has over 43,300,000 views on YouTube, is filling up Facebook timelines, and is trending on Twitter with the “Uganda” and “Invisible Children” terms.

Post Audio Messages to Facebook with MyMic

The MyMic Facebook application lets you post audio updates to your Facebook profile or onto your friend’s Wall. You can post up to five seconds for free and there are paid options to post longer messages.

I ran into the application’s creator, LeaAnna Hernandez (@MyMicApp on Twitter), during a #LATISM Twitter chat. I had asked the Twittersphere if there were any Latino/Latina startup techies out there and LeaAnna “raised her hand.”

Five Design Tips To Let Your Message Run Wild

I love sharing information, including technology trends, social media How To’s, breaking and local business news, and information on advocacy groups. On Twitter, I’ll share 5-10 items per day, sometimes in a rapid fire method. On Facebook I’ll “Like” or “Share” several posts a day. Multiply these activities by the number of Twitter and Facebook users and you have an unprecedented amount of sharing and re-sharing.

So why limit the scope of your message?

Facebook Creates Sneaky Way To Suck In Gmail Contacts

Google recently closed off Facebook’s access to import Gmail contacts. Google felt that if Facebook was able to import its Gmail contacts that Google should be able to import from Facebook. Since that wasn’t going to happen, Google pulled the plug on its Facebook integration.

To counter this Google move, Facebook added instructions to its site on how users can download their Gmail contacts then upload them to Facebook.

How To Get Facebook Page Notifications

Facebook has a myriad ways to receive notifications but not from your own Facebook Page (formerly known as “Fan Pages”).

In order to get notifications you have to do a workaround and “Like” your own Page post. After doing this for a while, this can get old for your regular Facebook profile friends.

Enter NutshellMail, an site that allows you to manage portions of your social network via email. My favorite feature – NutshellMail allows you to receive Facebook page notifications!

My Social Graph “Suggestions For You” Twitter

I was pleased to finally receive the “Suggestions For You” feature since I’ve been hearing about it all week. My initial impressions were:

  1. Dang, I thought I was following some of those people already
  2. Um, I recently unfollowed some of those folks
  3. There were several people who showed up frequently in the “Followed By:” field, but they weren’t people I engage with much
  4. There are a lot of celebrities on this list
  5. These are real people, not feeds

How To Create A Facebook Fan Page [VIDEO]

This tutorial will show you how to get started on building your own Facebook Page (I refer to them as “Fan Pages” in the video). This is Part One of the Facebook Fan Page project so make sure you bookmark this page, subscribe to the email blog posts, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed to keep track of further developments.