Ozzie Sport

I tend to be a bit obsessive. An issue that keeps cropping up in my personal sphere is women editing Wikipedia. Various reasons keep being offered as to why women don’t edit, if their reasons are different from those of men, if women don’t edit because they don’t have time as they are too busy taking care of their families, etc. I wanted to know why women and men in my particular peer group didn’t edit Wikipedia. Thus, I posted surveys to my Facebook and to my LiveJournal. The raw data, as of 10:13am American Central Standard time could be found at Facebook, LiveJournal. Please feel free to continue to vote. If I have bigger samples, I can always update this. I had responses from 22 people, 12 males and 10 females. This isn’t necessarily a representative sample and if I was looking for that, I’d try much harder to get a larger response from a bigger group of people. I don’t think you can necessarily extrapolate out much from this, except to have it help confirm other smaller samples.As a side note, the Facebook poll allows people to add their own responses. (The sample size isn’t statistically significant for one thing and one response can really change the percentages.) People have and it is possible that people may have chosen responses had they been available. In any case, on with the findings.

There were several options offered that no one selected. Those answers have not been included as the totals would have been 0% and given the small sample size, it didn’t seem as relevant.

There are some differences in responses between men and women, which appears to support the general conclusion that men and women have different reasons for (not) contributing to Wikipedia and that gender specific type engagement may be needed. One of the arguments that I’ve heard is that women would like to contribute to Wikipedia but they just do not have the time because they need to take care of their families. This small sample appears to suggest this isn’t the case: Women, much more than men in this sample, just have better things to do. I’ve talked to a few women in this sample about this to try to understand what better things they have to do, because I’ve heard the argument that women do use this type of technology and some people don’t understand why, if women do blogging and other online content creation, why they don’t contribute to Wikipedia. In this particular sample, the women I talked to explained it to me as they have a set of things they prioritise in what they do. In the case of one non-contributor, they do contribute to another wiki that immediately ties into her interests. Beyond that, she has learned that her contributions have value and that value can be realised by getting paid for them by writing for sites like associated content and squidoo. There isn’t the inherent value that can be realised when contributing to Wikipedia, so why should she spend the time contributing? This appears to be supported because of the six who said they have better things to do, only one female also said she didn’t have enough time to contribute.

A lot of the answers appear to have to do with community and negative interactions. Six women answered yes to “The atmosphere on Wikipedia is not conducive to random user editing.” as a reason why they don’t edit. This compares to only four of the twelve men. This was a common theme when I talked some of the women in this sample: The community is not supportive, things get undone, there aren’t people helping guide new contributors and serving as mentors. There isn’t much positive feedback. If you run into problems, you have to go ask for it yourself and then you get in trouble for canvassing. More experiences editors are involved in areas and they don’t do anything when it looks like there are obvious problems to the random female editor. The situation reminds me a bit of wikiHow. I haven’t edited there in a while, but I’ve generally highly respected what Jack Herrick and other admins have done with their wiki culture as a whole. They make welcoming a big thing. They provide lots of positive feedback. They appear to work on community. They offer ways to get recognition for your contributions. People involved in running it have always seemed highly accessible, even if they aren’t. wikiHow also appears to place a priority on civility that English Wikipedia only gives lip service to. Evidence? Become a wikiHow Admin states a criteria of being an admin: Empathy and kindness – Admins exist to serve the broader community of editors and readers. A demonstrated history of treating others with kindness and mutual respect is a necessity.

Beyond those two of The atmosphere on Wikipedia is not conducive to random user editing. and I have better things to do with my time., no answer had more than 50% of the female response… and worth noting, women had that. The male respondents didn’t have a voting block similar to that. The largest male response was The atmosphere on Wikipedia is not conducive to random user editing., with 33% answering that as a reason. The next largest male block I don’t want to research citations to support my edits. I can fix grammar/typos. , with 25% citing that as a reason. That response is not necessarily a community response, suggesting community problems so much as content policy and I don’t know how to address that.

I’d love to do a bigger survey with more results, see if responses change with more respondents. I do think it supports the idea that lack of time is not the major reason that women don’t contribute and that technology and the format discourage women from contributing. Only one female cited that as an issue. A refocus and reprioritisation may be needed if the goal is to increase female contributions to English Wikipedia.

I post and then two more people vote, one male and one female. If I get another ten total responses, I’ll update with new totals.

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Edited on February 23 to include job descriptions. Moved text on bottom to text on top.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the content I want to include in a three hour social media academy for people in the sport industry. (I’ve come to the conclusion that I may just make a number of pages that are largely unrelated, then target the contents for the people who are there, their skill levels and their needs.) One of the things I thought was important to include in such a lesson was understanding some of the jobs in social media, who does them and how they interact with others. I was looking for a chart that could explain this but could not find one so I created my own.

Not every social media connected job is on here. Graphic designer could probably be included with the web designer. User experience designer could possibly be on there, connected between web developer and community manager. The user experience designer could also be the web designer or part of web development.

In a small organization, some of these jobs probably are not needed or the organization does not have the resources for them. (Does a roller derby team need a product developer to create mobile application with social media tie ins? Probably not. Nice to have but not necessary.) In a small organization, you may also do multiple jobs.

What isn’t shown here is how these jobs relate back to the wider organization that the person must also work with. That structure is probably as important or more important than the relationships shown in this chart. These relationships may change what the person’s view as their primary objectives in how they handle their job. A social media manager may work with a community relations person inside a professional sport team. The social media manager may also work for marketing. The social media manager could also possibly work inside a digital content team. Mapping this is impossible because the interaction between social media and other structures inside an organization are dependent on that organization’s goals.

The following contain social media related job descriptions.
Community Manager: The person who manages a community on a mailing list, social network, wiki, etc. The purpose of the community manager is to help grow the community, and to keep the existing community happy and active in line with organizational objectives. This work may be done solely in house on a company’s own sites or may involve community management on external sites such as Twitter and Facebook.  It includes tasks such as moderating user content, and providing feedback about user views to others inside the organization.
Content Manager: The person who creates and publishes content online related to the organization.  This content is created to fit with the organization’s objectives.
Link Builder: A search engine optimization person who tries to get inbound links for the organization’s site.  These links should be rel=follow.  Many of these can be found on social media related sites.
Product Developer: The person who helps develop online tools like Facebook applications, mobile phone applications and social media widgets. Developer needs programming skills in languages like perl, ruby on rails, and php.
Reputation Manager: The person who monitors social media for an organization and then, in conjunction with other departments, implements a strategy to deal with various types of reputation related issues.
Search Engine Marketer: The person who improves a site’s backend in order to optimize search traffic, plans and implements campaigns to optimize a site to get search traffic for certain keywords related to an organization’s objectives, buys links and buys advertisements on search engines related to specific keyword searches.
Social Media Manager: The person who implements an organization’s social media plan, including tasks like building the organization’s brand, improving traffic to the organization’s website, manage social media accounts on sites like Twitter and Facebook, coordinates with other people in the organization to accomplish organizational objectives.
System Administrator: The person who manages the backend, the servers for a organization.  They also install software and keep all the computers running.
Web Designer: The person who manages a website’s front end.  They design the look of the site, work on integrating social media into the site’s look.
Web Developer: The person responsible for integrating a website’s front end and back end.  They make sure any software to be installed will work.

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I’ve been thinking about how to teach people to use social media (and the webs) lately. The topic is huge and hard to narrow down. There are a bunch of things that could be covered. Everything from Facebook & Twitter, analytics, data mining, reputation management, SEO and social media, Mobile application, Video and social media, RSS vs API, programming, social bookmarking, etc.

The average person doesn’t really need to know most of this stuff. You don’t need to know how to install a server to appreciate the fact that if you use social media to generate a lot of traffic to your site, your site may go down. All you need to do is appreciate what your server is capable of and have good communication with your server people.

My biggest hurdle in teaching people about social media is they don’t see the relevance of social media to their lives and their goals. My biggest problem with social media experts is they are obsessed with tools, while forgetting underlying marketing principles. It means that many of these social media experts suck at actually selling the value of social media.

One of my big problem with teaching people about social media using existing materials is that many of the educational type materials that teach social media online tend to be behaviorist (Let me show you how to make a screencast using this type of software. Let me show you how to use this feature on YouTube) or cater to one particular learning style (Watch this YouTube video. Read this paragraph.). I’ll give an example of things that I’ve been talking about recently with others: Some one taught me how to make playlists on YouTube. I figured it out. I’ll never use this skill again. What’s the value for me? Why would I do this again? Some one else linked me to a video on YouTube to learn about some social media thing or another. I don’t learn from watching videos. (First, my computer is slow and has problems with YouTube.) I can’t sit still to watch them. If I’m not interested in the topic, there is no social pressure to bring my attention back. There is no way for me to get feedback. This goes against the learning style that works best for me. I don’t understand the relevance to my own work as the person linking me to it didn’t provide it and it didn’t come across in the video.

Those issues aside for the moment, there is the question of what to teach in a general introduction to social media type class. A couple of things come to mind immediately:

• Why should people use social media?  What are people’s objectives in using social media?  This includes: Who are people’s audience for social media related activities?  Where is that audience located online?
• What are the different social networks out there?  (How do they help people accomplish their goals, reach their audience where that audience is located?)
• What the privacy implications of using social media?  Is your information actually private?
• What are the copyright implications of using social media?  Who actually owns what you post to a site?
• What are social media related jobs?  How do these various jobs connect?  What do people in those jobs do?
• What are social media related analytics? How do you gather these numbers?  What do they matter?
• What is reputation management?  How do you do monitor social media?  Why would you do that?  How does it in to the questions above?

None of these are things that I think are very industry specific.  Many of these could apply to both institutions and to individuals.  It is just an issue of remembering that keeping my friends and family updated while I study abroad is just as valid of an objective as trying to increase sport participation rates in rural areas.

The social network issue is a big one.  Teach some one to use Facebook and they can use Facebook.  (And then not, as they fail to the see the relevance to their personal objectives.)  Teach some one to use Twitter and they can use Twitter.  (They may not be able to use identi.ca, plurk or Yammer.)  How do you teach that?

If you’re me, I’d first have a person list some objective they have that they may want to use social media for.  I’d then ask them who would an audience be to help them accomplish that objective.  I’d then ask them where they think those people may hang out on the Internet.  These aren’t easy questions to answer and you have to get in the mindset to do this but you need it anyway.  It provides context and relevance for the learner in everything else as they go forward.

The next thing I’d do is I’d give each person a list of five to ten sites.  The list would not include: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, Digg, Flickr, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Foursquare.  These sites are popular and most people have probably have heard of them.  They’ve probably used them.  Instead, the list might include: Bebo, orkut, Quizilla, Gowalla, Yahoo!Answers, Plurk, identi.ca, LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, BlackPlanet, 43 Things, Quora, Care2, Ecademy, Yahoo!Groups, Vimeo, Friendster, Gaia Online, hi5, last.fm, WordPress, CafeMom, DeviantART, eons.com, Library Thing.  I’d ask students to read about the sites.  (Wikipedia is a great place to start.)  I’d ask them to poke around the site, try to find out who uses them (Alexa, Compete, Quantcast can begin to give an idea), how active are site users (updating daily? updating yearly?  register and then forget the site exists?),  what sort of features the sites have (video? blogging? microblogging? photo uploading?  groups?  mailing list? rss?  checkins?), what sort of privacy users have, what sort of ways can you measure things on the site (total followers? total viewers?  total answers to questions?) and then I’d ask them how these sites can or cannot help them accomplish their goals.  I’d also have them present that information to the group: I looked at Last.fm to see if it could help me keep up with industry people in sport.  Last.fm is dedicated to music, not sport and it is hard to see if those people are using the site and most people don’t update frequently their blogs often so it doesn’t work for me.

This is important because you’re forced to look at sites that you may not be familiar with, you’re being asked to examine the site critically, and you’re being asked to relate it back to your own life.  Different learning styles can be incorporated in for those who aren’t as keen to learn by exploring.  An instructor can provide links to relevant videos on YouTube (How to use Plurk), to texts (Plurk @ Wikipedia, Plurk @ Alexa, Plurk @ Google Scholar) to cater to users who learn by watching and to users who learn by reading in addition to learners who learn by doing and talking.

The group can prepare for the above by walking through this with one or two of the sites mentioned: What sort of privacy do you have on Twitter and Facebook?  Who uses Twitter and Facebook?  What sort of copyright is there on Facebook and Twitter?  How does that apply to your goals?

The important take away should not be: I know how to use Facebook! The important take away should be: These social networks are tools to help me accomplish my goals.  Some might not be useful to me.  Others may be more useful to me.  The important take away should be that users begin to think about who uses these sites, how private those sites really are, what tools these sites have that people can use.  When they see some social media guru talking up Quora and the student doesn’t get why Quora is the greatest social media network ever, they will now be able to explain as it relates to them.  (I can’t tell how popular I am on Quora.  I don’t get a nifty e-mail saying that I have the best answer ever.  I don’t like the copyright policies.  Search leaves something to be desires.)

If you teach about social media and your focus is on the tool, rather than on the conceptual ideas behind them, your knowledge becomes very dated very fast.  It is the the underlying reasons behind using these tools that matters more than the tools themselves.

The other parts of what I discussed teaching I will probably do in another post as this has gone on a bit longer than I intended.  (And if you learn by doing and talking, comment as I interact.  If you learn by watching, um.  Ouch.  Can’t help you with this post.)

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I’m getting a few little scripts developed. The goal is to modify some of my existing Australian sport ones to work for Australian politics. Then figure out how to work them on a smaller scale (my Alexa sport list is about 900) and then scale them up. It is a long term project and the results will eventually be put on their own blog. One of the things getting tweaked is my Alexa script. I have a few Australian political sites that I found. If there are more sites you want monitored, let me know (data will probably be attained daily here on out) and I’ll add them to my list. For the moment, I have the following comparisons for you…

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Stress relief involves playing with data and getting interesting results. The whole #dickileaks controversy was interesting because I ran into a number of political people on Twitter that I interacted with. I have posted about Australian politics before but I generally don’t. (Australian and New Zealand sport keeps me more than busy.) I have this nifty tool that allows me to get a person’s Twitter followers and try to determine their city, state, country location with an Australian focus. (Some things out there are a bit American centric and thus less reliable when it comes to Australia.) The program works by taking a user inputted location, stripping it of all non-alpha characters, ignoring cases and comparing to this list here. If a location is unknown or blank, it runs a person’s location against a timezone list to try to determine the city/state/country. In developing it, some foreign were ignored. I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time trying to match every possible French or American city to France or the USA. Instead, I sometimes just left the country field as France or the USA and moved on. The list obviously doesn’t pick up every possible variation but it generally picks up about half. The raw data can be found here for Joe Hockey and Julia Gillard.

Anyway… once I had that, I tallied up the total number of followers by city. I also did a partial sample of overlap between Gillard’s followers and Hockeys: Unique to Gillard: 3890. Unique to Hockey: 2343. Common to both: 303. We’ll go with 5 to 10% overlap between the two. (Some one can use the text files to compare that and get a better number if they want.) Onto the important things… total followers by cities for the people I could identify by city for Gillard and Hockey. If some one could help me map this data, I’d be really grateful.

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I’m a little bit interested in Australian politics. I’m hoping to set it up so I can get daily data that I do for sport for Australian politicians. (Twitter, Foursquare, Alexa, Facebook.) The hope would be that I can get this data onto its own site and make it easily filterable, have all this data dump to a database. Each stage of getting this data involves identifying the relevant accounts. This list is a start on that: Most Australian politicians and political parties on Twitter. Unlike sport accounts, I’m not interested in getting “fan” accounts. Rather, I’m interested in getting a list of sitting (retired and current candidates) Australian politicians who are affiliated with a political party on the federal, state and local level. I’m also interested in including Australian political parties on the federal, state and local level. The list below is a start. If I’m missing anyone, please let me know.

Future updates for this by date can be found at #auspol @ Ozziesport, a blog I created for Australian politics related social media data dumping.

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Interesting point that had not occurred to me before: Should I be developing a list of Australian sport sponsors, connecting that to teams and leagues and tracking that growth? Easy enough to do. (I don’t want it mixed up with my existing data. I’d put it in a separate selection of files.) Probably worth tracking. Sponsors were an issue with the Monaghan story but outside of the Raiders, I had no data related to that particular topic.

I just already feel like I’m drowning in data at times. That’s one of my major hesitations. The others? Is that data as valuable as team data? Does it have worth related to my existing analysis? If I get this, am I really just doing market research analysis that has important findings where I’m not going to get compensated for by the people who will use it? How do I organize this data in the context of my existing framework?

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This was a recurring issue with Fan History and I hope it doesn’t become a recurring issue here… but I feel it is time to mention it again.

Privacy.

Your Twitter profile is not private information. It is public information. Twitter makes it public and allows developers to access who you follow, who follows you, total number of tweets, the date you joined, what timezone you list, the location you list, your profile description, the number of lists you appear on, etc. If you do not want that information to be public, then delete your Twitter account and find some one else’s account that you can read along on.

(Twitter doesn’t share your password. It generally tries to keep your DMs private. It can nominally protect your Twitter stream. Everything else is pretty public.)

There are a whole bunch of programs that allow people to access this data in other forms. It may or may not appear in search results. (Mine data collecting might if I upload it.) This list is a place to start to find programs that do analytics analysis. The only way to make your data inaccessible to these applications is often to : 1. Never have created an account to begin with, 2. Hope the program pulls only real time information, not historical information, after you’ve subsequently deleted your Twitter account in order to avoid showing up in them.

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If you haven’t figured out in my many posts, I’m not Australian; I’m an American. More specifically, I’m an American from the Chicago area with friends and family who live there. Of late, I’ve been interested in Foursquare check in patterns. (What’s the value? What’s the potential ROI? Are there patterns that appear that could be useful for using a campaign on? Is there another way to measure success beyond say coupons on site?) Rather than look at local patterns, or Australian patterns that could possibly be construed as research that might have copyright implications beyond my control, I decided to look at patterns for Chicago at one of my favorite chain restaurants. That was Subway. (Added bonus: Local to home research based on my sport methodology research, that could help me get a job back home [if I want to go back].)

I found a list of about 47 Chicago based Subways. Most of them appear in the loop. In at least one location, there appears to be a duplicate location. A script I had assistance with in developing checks those locations everyday at midnight US CST. It then records the total checkins and total people at the location for that day, compares the difference from the previous day and gives me the total checkins and total people for the past 24 hours. This process, once started, relatively easy. (If you have some business in the US Central Time, I could start getting that data for you tomorrow.) Every day, I get an e-mail with the total daily checkins in csv format. I put that data into an Excel file so I can process it. Fun stuff.

One of the patterns that has emerged is that there appear to be more weekday checkins to Chicago Subways. In fact, 15 Subways of the 47 have more weekday checks. 6 Subways have more weekday checkins. 25 of those locations are tied for checkins between weekdays and weekends. I believe with one exception, they have zero checkins across the five days looked at. The remaining Subway had a negative checkin and I slotted it into its category. Not sure why/how that happened that led to a negative checkin day.

The fact that these locations are mostly Loop locations probably explains a lot of what is going on with this data set. The Loop is the business district. Office workers would go to Subway during the week. They checkin during those times. Fewer workers in the city on the weekend, fewer checkins.

These patterns likely would be different for other businesses in Chicago (probably not as much in the loop) and elsewhere depending on that location and business type. More data on more businesses would be interesting. The holidays coming up will skew things for a bit because Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Years Eve, New Years Day are likely to be non-normal business days. I’d love to look at some of this data beyond my limited sample in order to better grasp how people are using the service and what the business implications are. (Is anyone really looking at total daily checkins for certain classes of businesses? If so, would be something I’d love to read!)

Anyway… on with the data!

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I was having a conversation yesterday about training academics in the use of social media.  One of the points that came up was what were the important social networks for academics to use and be trained in.  I believe the person I was talking to thought blogger and wikis were two of the three important sites academics can be using.  Those wouldn’t be my first choice; mine would be Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

A lot of the reasons why people doing training and advising as to what people use probably has to do with what they get out of sites. Personally, I don’t get much out of blogger.  (I use WordPress on its own domain.  I use LiveJournal. I’d chose both over blogger but then again, I haven’t really used blogger.)  I think wikis are awesome.  (Attend RecentChangesCamp!) I just don’t know that academics would get recognition that they might seek.  Rather, they would probably be producing shared content or learning about a tool that might help them with their in classroom teaching.  I know the person I talked to gets a lot of out of them and I think both could give a lot.  They just aren’t ones that come to mind for me.

I’d recommend Twitter as a way of keeping up with colleagues and making new contacts.  (A public version of Yammer.)  The problem with Twitter is that in selling Twitter to academics, you’ve also got to sell certain types of behavior: As some one worth following, you’ve got to provide value to the people you’re following.  This means you’ve got to teach that and get into some of the meta aspects of using social networks that you don’t necessarily need to do with blogger.

I’d recommend Facebook as a way of being aware of what students are up to and how they think.  I’d also recommend it as a way of turfing out the space.  In recommending how to use Facebook, I’d tell academics the same things I’d tell sport clubs and athletes: Set up a personal profile with people you know and trust.  (Do not add students as friends.)  After that, set up a fan page.  Use the fan page to post things you want public like links to research you’re doing, office hours, announcements, links to interesting content, etc.  This type of space is different than Twitter and LinkedIn as there is a different audience and different purpose for using it.

LinkedIn is about networking with professionals.  It is about developing a resume of sorts.  It works as a medium to contact people by setting an expectation that your goals are professionally oriented.  I know of a couple of places that aren’t interested in resumes and CVs.  Rather, they want LinkedIn.  This is why I’d recommend it.  The social aspects of this aren’t necessarily reasons why I’d recommend it.  I don’t think academics would need to update often.  There is some value in LinkedIn groups, if you can find one small enough and you’re interested in having conversations and promoting your work.   I’ve found it useful for those, but I can’t see most people doing that.

There are a lot of networks out there that could be valuable for academics.  It really depends on who is teaching about them, and the teacher’s perspective and experiences.

What networks are on your list for ones you’d recommend for others?

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