I am not sure about everyone else, but every time I am prompted with a question to vote online, I participate almost every time. I go on various website throughout the day and almost everyone of them has some type of voting question. It's so easy to do and it always makes me curious when the instant results are posted after your vote.
I definitely agree with Kanter & Fine (p.107) on their thoughts that crowds love to vote. I am an avid sports fan and always participate on espn.com or other sporting websites on my favorite players, or who I think should be MVP of a season, etc. This is a great way for our local non-profits to get instant public feedback on what the public wants to see the most.
From what I have seen so far, this practice is done very little, if at all at our local non-profits. It's a perfect tool for what Kanter and Fine say, taking the crowd's temperature (p. 107). There is an issue though and as we have all stated in our blog posts over the last few weeks, we don't know if these organizations have the capacity or knowledge to create such a tool.
The days of standing on a corner and asking bystanders to fill out a questionnaire are just about over. Also, people these days don't feel they have the time to sit and reflect on their experience at a museum for example and send a post card back in. Everyone is online now and instant feedback with online voting could help these organizations immensely.
-Matt Schofield
Hi Matt,
ReplyDeleteIt looks like Facebook has a Polling tool that can be used for voting though Facebook. The only problem I see with it is that if the organization wants to use the free version, the voter has to allow the app to access their information. I don't use facebook apps that want that kind of access. If the user/organization doesn’t want people put off by this access requirement, they can pay $9 per poll.
I guess this brings up a question: how comfortable are people with allowing third-party access to their information? I think a lot of young people are very lenient about this. But there are still people who are wary. Should organizations take privacy issues into account in regards to social media? Can they be lax about it, or do they need to draw the line somewhere?
Here is the app: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=20678178440/
Matt,
ReplyDeleteHere is a post on Social Media and privacy I thought was interesting:
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/05/10/is-facebook-eroding-privacy-or-does-social-media-require-us-to-lower-our-expectations/