Using social media to promote constitutional rights awareness

New Media

This work will propose three potential issues or challenges to address and will identify two potential social media communication tools and describe what could be done to solve each issue using these two tools. According to Graham, (nd) Social media includes social networking platforms including Facebook and Flickr but social media can also be such as "bulletin boards, podcasts, blogs, wikis, etc." (Graham, nd) In fact, social media is "anything where users can participate, create, and share content." (Graham, nd)

Issue to Be Solved

The issue chosen to be addressed in this work in writing is the issue of government failure to adhere to constitutional values in governance in the U.S. House, U.S. Congress, Legislature, and Senate and throughout the country various State and County Courts. This is an issue that is worthy of being addressed since enactment of the Patriot and Patriot II Acts have served to cripple the application of the United States Constitution and most specifically the Bill of Rights.

This issue is presently under debate by presidential hopefuls and is an issue that is coming to the forefront of the U.S. public attention most particularly since the bank frauds and Wall Street bankers are the focus of the protests throughout the United States. At issue have been such as police enforcement abuses and civil rights violations against American citizens for exercising their Constitutional rights to free speech and assembly.

Therefore, the writer of this study has determined that an E-Book should be published and specifically one that is easy to read, that is informative about the rights of American citizens, and which rights that the Constitution protects and that the Patriot I and Patriot II Acts violate in their application. Two social media tools are chosen for the purpose of spreading the E-Book information, which is targeted both widely and rapidly for the purpose of informing American citizens in sufficient time for their consideration prior to the next presidential primaries.

II. E-Book Publishing and Use of Social Media Tools

Two social media tools have been chosen for the purpose of publicizing and advertising the upcoming E-Book, which was presented in section I of this work in writing. Those social media tools are:

(1) Facebook; and (2) Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter are chosen due to their extensive use as social media communication tools. These websites are utilized in a network that is expansive in its reach and that enables the rapid spread of information and knowledge across the entire globe.

III. Facebook

Facebook is a website, which enables the individual to build their own profile and to add photos and other information about their personal, business and family life. Facebook is a social media tool used by families and friends to stay in touch and that is used for reacquainting between individuals who have not spoken in decades. Facebook is used as a meeting place for individuals with the same interests or history and it is also a website that is used as a social meeting place or in other words, it is used as a virtual club or commons.

IV. Twitter

Twitter, just as Facebook is a social media tool in the form of a website that enables individuals to stay in touch throughout their day or week and that enables those with the same interests or commonalities to meet, speak, listen and collaborate on issues or events that they feel is important.

V. Promotion of the E-Book

Promotion of an E-Book on Facebook and Twitter would be a very easy task as the individual would simply post the information on their homepage and then all of their friends who receive the individual's homepage posts each day would be exposed to the information concerning the e-book, where it can be read, purchased, checked out or otherwise accessed. According to the work entitled "Content Marketing Playbook: 42 Ways to Connect with Customers" published by Junta 42 an E-book is what can be conceived as "a white paper on steroids…a report, generally 12-40 or more pages in length, that presents complex information in a visually attractive, reader-friendly format. The content is both informative and entertaining, the tone, collegial, the format, 'chunky' rather than linear, to facilitate skimming and scanning." (Junta 42, 2010)

The E-Book is cited as a great tool for use in "companies with complex products or services" and in "organizations who can or want to promote thought leaders" and finally as "driving a stake in the ground on an important topic." (Junta 42, 2010) Such is the case in this present study. The three key play points for the e-book is stated to include those as follows:

(1) Develop your distribution strategy early: how will you get your ebook into reader hands?

(2) think visually: make liberal use of bullets, callouts, sidebars, graphs, etc.;

(3) Conclude with a solid call to action: what should readers do next? (Junta 42, 2010)

The New Yorker article entitled "Small Change" states "The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns." (Gladwell, 2010)

IV. Promotion of Newsletter

It is reported that one of the first steps in combining email and social media is through newsletters. The newsletter is utilized for the purpose of expanding the base of readers beyond newsletter subscribers and doing so with no extra cost. The newsletter further enables constant contact and included in the newsletter that is successful is a share bar so that readers can share the newsletter on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn or other popular social media websites. Combing email and social media is reported to be a concept that is not new and posting links to newsletter on social media web pages is becoming increasingly common. Also used are widgets and other apps to add newsletter sign up forms to blogs and other social media pages. (Practical E-Commerce, 2011, paraphrased) The newsletter can be easily linked to Facebook and Twitter toward promoting the initiative stated in this study.

III. Measurements of Success

Measuring success with social media marketing is reported to be accomplished through selecting the "right metrics, this means getting specific about your business objectives and strategies before thinking through social objectives." (Cormode and Krishnamurthy, 2008) One example is Altimeter's Social Media Measurement Compass. It is related that the points of the compass make identification of six major business goals that social media can assist in influencing. Those six points include:

(1) Innovation -- collaboration with customers;

(2) Brand health: attitude measurement;

(3) Customer experience;

(4) Marketing optimization;

(5) Operational efficiency; and (6) Revenue generation. Cormode and Krishnamurthy, 2008

Part Two - Web 1.0 Tools vs. Web 2.0 Tools

The work of Cormode and Krishnamurthy (2008) states that Web 2.0 "Web 2.0" captures a combination of innovations on the Web in recent years. A precise definition is elusive and many sites are hard to categorize with the binary label "Web 1.0" or "Web 2.0." But there is a clear separation between a set of highly popular Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and the "old Web." (Cormode and Krishnamurthy, 2008) These separations are reported to be "visible when projected onto a variety of axes, such as technological; structural; and sociological. " (Cormode and Krishnamurthy, 2008) In addition, it is reported that Web 2.0 is "…both a platform on which innovative technologies have been built and a space where users are treated as first class objects. The platform sense consists of various new technologies (mashups, AJAX, user comments) on which a variety of popular social networks such as Facebook, MySpace etc. have been built…" (Cormode and Krishnamurthy, 2008) The primary difference stated between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that content creators "were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content, while any participant can be a content creator in Web 2.0 and numerous technological aids have been created to maximize the potential for content creation." (Cormode and Krishnamurthy, 2008)

Stated to be important site features that mark out a Web 2.0 site are those as follows:

(1) Users as first class entities in the system, with prominent profile pages, including such features as: age, sex, location, testimonials, or comments about the user by other users;

(2) The ability to form connections between users, via links to other users who are "friends," membership in "groups" of various kinds, and subscriptions or RSS feeds of "updates" from other users;

(3) The ability to post content in many forms: photos, videos, blogs, comments and ratings on other users' content, tagging of own or others' content, and some ability to control privacy and sharing.

(4) Other more technical features, including a public API to allow third-party enhancements and "mash-ups," and embedding of various rich content types (e.g. Flash videos), and communication with other users through internal email or IM systems. (Cormode and Krishnamurthy, 2008)

Social media Web 2.0 tools are stated to include those as follows:

(1) Implicit Social Applications. Skype, which offers voice calling over the Internet, now has over 80M users globally, and is constantly adding new features (conference calls, voice mail).

(2) Peer-to-peer and Web 2.0. A P2P peer who supplies content of interest is not a friend in the social networking sense. Friends in real life may share interests in similar content (books, music etc.) but often they share pointers in the form of recommendations. In the P2P sense, friends in real life act as .torrent files. There may well be interest in consuming the bits simultaneously and interacting as people do now over the phone while watching a sports event.

(3) The Web 2.0 Electronic Fence. Web 2.0 can bring balkanization -- people in one social network may not communicate frequently with some of their friends who spend more time on other social networks. Artificial separation into tribes is encouraged by some of the Web2 sites who want to maximize and retain the set of members inside their "electronic fence." However, there is a counter-current due to the prevalent link-based nature of the Web -- users will constantly link to sites outside the fence. This will be sufficient to prevent complete balkanization.

(4) Web 2.0 notification and sharing friends. More sites are inviting users to "add friends," but there are only so many times that a user wants to find which of their friends on the same site. If this is not necessary to use the site, then users can ignore this, or use a 'bugmenot' equivalent. But for some sites (such as Facebook), all value comes from connecting to friends. Sites currently offer the highly dubious (in terms of both security and accuracy) technique of users sharing their email address books in order to find contacts via email address matching. One proposal is to allow users to record their "social graph" (encoded in XML formats such as FOAF) once, and allow different sites to access this information, essentially linking up all the currently isolated graphs (the MySpace graph, the Facebook graph, the Flickr graph). More insidiously, 3rd party sites can tap into a user's social connection via open APIs and cookie-sharing agreements with a Web 2.0 site acting as an identity manager, akin to a widened notion of the Microsoft Passport. Privacy and Security. We iterate that there are significant challenges in allowing users to understand privacy implications and to easily express usage policies for their personal data. Privacy is typically not well understood by Web2 users, resulting in unintended consequences. Many teenagers accept that their posted data may unintentionally identify them. Simultaneously, dynamic presentation technologies also raise security concerns. Both privacy and security in Web2 demands explicit study and analysis." (Cormode and Krishnamurthy, 2008)

The work of O'Reilly and Battelle (2005) state that Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 when compared reveal the following contrasts:

Web 1.0 Web 2.0

DoubleClick Google AdSense

Ofoto Flickr

Akamai BitTorrent

Mp3.com Napster

Britannica Online Wikipedia

Personal websites blogging

Evite Upcoming org and EVDB

Domain name speculation search engine optimization

Page views costs per click

Screen scraping web services

Publishing participation

Content management systems wikis

Directories tagging

Stickiness syndication