New Tools for Small Businesses

Posted By Michael D'Elicio ~ 16th January 2009

New Tools for Small Businesses

Here’s an excerpt from an article I just read, discussing the ability to organize online and why it’s become so suddenly powerful (full article here):

Social networking is not new and not about technology. It’s not about MySpace, Facebook or YouTube; instead it’s about what all of us do every day: kindle and expand networks of friends, family, co-workers, etc. In the political context it’s about finding and building communities of interest, linking common struggles and acting collectively. Facebook and other online social networking tools are just a new way for people engage in this age-old activity.

But at the same time, the online universe is not simply another place for people to congregate, circulate a petition, debate politics or mail out a newsletter. Nor is it simply a new technology like cable television–merely bringing more channels into the home. Instead, the web is increasingly looking like the invention of the printing press, which radically changed the lives of even those who could not read, by spurring the Protestant reformation and scientific revolution.

During the past several years, the Internet has evolved from its first generation as a static information portal (e.g. websites) to what is now referred to as Web 2.0, marked by the explosion of user-generated and interactive content. According to Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations and one of the best chroniclers of the social implications of Web 2.0, this communications revolution promises to be the “largest increase in human expressive capability in history.” There are five reasons why this revolutionary electronic space is especially relevant to the future of the global social movements:

1. Group Formation: New social networking tools, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to e-mail and listservs, make forming groups–and hopefully social movements–much easier. Every time organizers knock on doors, hold a community meeting or organize a protest the primary goal is to entice individuals into group activity; they hope to transform isolated actors with little social power into a powerful collective force for social change. The problem is that group formation has always been very hard to do.

What is new about tools like Facebook is that they make more varieties of group formation possible. Now, totally on their own, millions of people are finding others who care about the same things they do, whether it be around oyster farming, workplace complaints or radical politics. What the web has revealed is that there were thousands of these latent groups that for hundreds of years were never able to form, because it was too difficult for people to identify others with similar interests and too difficult for them to efficiently communicate when they did. So now even the most transient and marginalized sectors in society can potentially form support and sharing networks. Thousands from the homeless community, for example, have gathered online to share their stories and swap survival strategies, often posting from public libraries.

At their core, social movements are about group formation, and suddenly the tools exist to make it much easier to bring people together. In practice, we might begin by helping ordinary people access and learn how to use these tools and enable them to uncover their own latent groups–groups that may well not fit neatly into narrow organizational agendas. Social movement activists might also spend more time trafficking where people are already gathering online, such as within the Obama social networks, and practice getting in the middle conversations and shifting debates.

2. Scale and amplification: With a single keystroke, social movements can now push information out to millions of people and lift up marginalized voices into national, and even global, spheres. But scale increasingly does not just mean trying to reach the whole world, especially as it has become increasingly difficult to break through the online noise. Scale is also about surgically communicating with discrete sets of readers. At GLS, for example, rather than targeting the global labor movement writ large, we have tried to target the narrow subset of the global labor movement that is grappling with long-term, strategic questions of worker and class representation in the global economy. Two decades ago we could never have precisely and cheaply carved out this audience.

3. Interactivity: The web is not a one-way transmission belt like television; it’s more akin to the telephone, allowing conversation, intimacy and debate by tapping into the fundamental human desire for self-expression and shared communication. Much of the strength of social movement organizations lies in their ability to empower those shut out of elite political activity to participate. With the Internet encouraging this participatory tendency, social movements need to approach their technology platforms as more than just a new way to send out fliers and opinion pieces or run petition drives. They need to build freewheeling electronic spaces where people can share, debate and collaborate.

4. Destruction of hierarchies: Elites have long dominated the broadcast and distribution networks, making them the primary gatekeepers of information flow, allowing them to frame and dominate political discourse, and decide what is and what is not news. But new broadcast tools increasingly allow ordinary people to publish and distribute their own news and begin redirecting information flows. The elites are terrified of this “mass amateuration” of broadcasting. The mass layoffs of journalists and the frantic fears of politicians who never know when a swarm of people might go on the attack are two recent examples of this erosion of the power of the “professional classes.”

5. Cheapness and ease of tools: Social movement organizations have been perennially under-resourced, and with the current financial crisis and global recession the situation will surely worsen. But with the advent of web-enabled mobile phones and $300 computers, cutting-edge communication tools are becoming cheaper and more powerful, and as a result, are quickly leveling the technological playing field. In South Africa, for example, even though Internet penetration remains at around 10 percent, mobile phone penetration sits at 98.5 percent.

Social networking tools are also becoming easier to use. Just in the past two years, people with little technical ability are now able to create websites, Facebook pages, YouTube videos, etc. We’re drawing closer to the point where the majority of online tools are so simple that technical experts are beginning to fade into the background. The web is no longer the exclusive dominion of the young and highly educated, and as this trend continues it will allow social movements to cheaply and easily reach out to increasingly diverse constituencies.

Now take that from the point of view of the small business owner: cheap methods of promoting products and services in an interactive manner, while being able to organize into networks with other small businesses in order to cross-promote, as past hierarchies within the business community begin to erode? That sounds like something worth investigating…