- Most of the users of the service is youth (82% aged 25 and younger)
- Our LIVE mobile counselling service on average receives 200 queries per hour with approximately 92% being identified as youth.
- Most youth request further support, but prefer having it via the Mobile medium. Even when we recommend centres to attend or websites to visit they want a solution that they can access via their mobile phone.
- We’ve developed Mobile virtual support sessions with experts or professional counsellors and achieve 100% referral rate compared to 26% when referral is telephonic and/or face-to-face.
- Most youth are expert mobile phone users and would be able to transfer relevant information in required formats (text, audio, video, images)
- Youth tend to promote mobile services faster and easier to their friends/buddies/contacts via their mobile phones.
- The average number of contacts/buddies/friends youth will actively chat to daily is 19 (based on mobile interviews with LIVE conversations). Most youth would have more than 50 contacts/buddies/friends in their Mobile Instant Messenger (MXit).

As we are continuously trying to improve our Social services through the use of mobile phones, it is advisable for organisations working in this space to start considering the more active use of mobile phones.

Twitter:
- Twitter indicated that it has more than 190 million users tweeting with more than 65 million tweets a day. (South Africa has 55,000 active twitter users as indicated in a recent study.)
- The use of an open API ensures that 75% of Twitter traffic is generated from outside of twitter.com
- Approximately 65% of the world’s top 100 companies have a twitter account
- Twitter’s search engine gets more than 600 million queries a day. Monthly, this is proportionately more than Bing and Yahoo.
- There are more than 70,000 applications currently using Twitters API

MXit (South African based Mobile Social Network):
- More than 20 million users in South Africa growing at 4000 new users per day.
- Estimated 25 million users log into MXit daily
- Approximately 350 million messages are share via MXit per day.

The above is just an indication of how Social Media is still growing and being adopted by users hungry for sharing and engaging via the web and increasingly more so via mobile.

- In practical terms, the advisors have the capacity to help more people (n = 27) in a two-hour session than advisors at helplines (n = 4).20 The DAS system aggregates the conversations for the advisors, allowing them to respond to the requests more easily and faster.
- The DAS system enables multiple advisors to assist during a given session.
- When an advisor does not have the necessary experience or skills to deal with a case, it can easily be transferred to someone with the necessary skills.
- The advisor receiving the reassigned conversation can view previous conversations with the client, so questions need not be duplicated.
- The advisor can refer a person in need to any other organisation, and maintain a help directory of available services.
- The service proved to be particularly useful for families of drug users, and they were offered family sessions and help if required

The full research paper was publsihed in the South African Family Practice journal.

Source: http://marlonparker.co.za

Presentation for the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) Research Day Showcase this Friday, 4 December. With communities experiencing tension through various social ills its facing, research and innovation can be used to bring about social change. Universities have an opportunity to partner with community organisations and communities to support Communities in Tension (CiTs).

Common broadcasting and advertising techniques were useless and didn’t work; emphasising how worthless it might be to try any serious promotion online. But some initiatives succeeded, even over expectation, suggesting that there were possibilities to dig into over there. The web had changed from a publication media mastered by institutions, to a social media characterised by an organised chaos controlled by users. People had just come to get their power back. Some authors noted the capacity of the web to empower people, and shared on how incredible their actions could become when they were mobilised. Hence, new approaches based on the understanding of the phenomenon web 2.0 were unveiled or brought online: like “word of mouth”, Business intelligence, direct marketing, or one to one marketing. They were denoting a paradigm shift towards technology driven by users.

Some of the key elements of an online campaign are Mission, Goals & objectives, Targeting, Planning, Organising, Approach of advertising, Platform, Engage and Measure. Today we will lexplore the first three of these campaigning elements as found in the research with some experts in the field:

- Mission, Goals & Objectives: Build a list of actions, Determine your online advertising goals and make sure they are realistic. Also ensure that they are measurable. Remember the 5 Ts: Talkers, topics, tools, taking part, tracking as part of your online campaigning strategy. Know your goals well and it should be clear.

- Targeting: Going where the people are and knowing your niche. Identify group and individual motivations and then craft your campaign to guide both leaders and followers without condescension or marketing spin. Targeting strategies must support your marketing objectives. Find out who your talkers are.

- Planning: Establish online credibility and trust through a stepped approach. Building the online operation to scale Fit Social Networking into Your “Ecosystem” and create mechanisms to motivate offline action. Build Your Own Social Network,
Built social tools around a network of people who were already online and engaged with their organization. Add social features to your existing Web site. Build credibility by enhancing the community.Tell a Story and define multiple ways in which supporters can take action and meet each other. Learn while you are doing and take full advantage of the desire and competencies of Internet users to reach the right people with right message rather than the most people and the same message. Learn which topics are working and join in the conversation starting by listening to your target market.

If you have anything to contribute to the above discussions please leave it under comments and sure there are much to be learned in the online campaigning market.

The Community in Tension Project fits into the emerging Community Informatics field for the following reasons:
• It is using wireless and community based technology from a local centre; This decreases installation and running costs
• It is there for a socially excluded group, who have no resources of their own
• The Mxit language used is cheaper to use than other texting formats
• The group manage the project – questions come in and are answered by the peers.
RLabs projects strengths and weaknesses are as demonstrated by the Schuurman analysis .The partnership model for the RLabs is the community, academia, industry and government. (See Figure 5). The difference of this project to other living labs is that the community; Athlone; leads the project and are not reliant on funds from other partners: (although funds have to be raised in other ways). The choice of technology was by the community, as was the choice of partners. The future social transformation of a community in tension is led by the community.

You can read more about RLabs (previously known as Athlone Living Lab) and Social and Community Informatics in a technical report here.

“The power of the Internet as a facility is that it has allowed many people worldwide to use it without feeling the real bite of the term ‘cost’. It comprises of numerous technologies that create an interesting question: How far has the information technology world come in terms of development? The introduction of a Web 2.0 technology known as weblogs or blogging has fast become a popular choice of application used on the Internet. Blogging prove to have both major advantages and disadvantages when used in the business environment. Not much research has been conducted on the personal impact blogging has on individuals. An issue that this paper addresses is in determining how helpful blogging can be when used by a group of individuals that are in the phase of drug rehabilitation. Ex-drug addicts and gang members from the Cape Flats in Cape Town were used as a case to investigate how much of an impact blogging had on them on a personal level, in their everyday lives and others that surround them. Blogging could be an alternative assisting or possibly empowering individuals in communities with tension allowing them to express themselves and see the world from a new perspective.”

Source: Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference on World Wide Web Applications 3-5 September 2008, Cape Town, South Africa