Institutional Use of Social Media In Europe

A recent series of blog referrer links from a post entitled entitled “Rànquing d’universitats i estructures de recerca de Catalunya a les xarxes socials” brought my attention to a number of benchmarking surveys of use of social media in higher educational institutions outside the UK.

The blog post — which can be read in an automatically translated English version if you do not understand the Catalan language :-) — describes how:

The presence of social networks and academic institutions doing research is increasingly consolidated. Realizing the importance of this fact, I thought it might be useful to show what institutions are visible to the networks and to what degree.

The blog post provides a summary of use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in the seven public universities (and a number of research organisations) in Catalonia. The findings are shown in the accompanying image (and note that the original was an image rather than a table).  The findings can be compared with the findings for Institutional Use of Twitter by Russell Group Universities, carried out in January 2011 from which we found a much greater diversity on the number of followers, which ranged from 965 to over 12,000 and Use of Facebook by Russell Group Universities also carried out in January 2011 for which the number of ‘likes’ ranged for 977 to over 137,000. The much greater popularity of Twitter and Facebook in the UK is perhaps not surprising, as such US inventions are likely to have an impact initially in the English-speaking world, but it is interesting to notice the much greater variation within the UK.

The article provides a link to a post summarising use of Twitter in French universities for which the findings are shown in the following table. This table also shows that Twitter is more popular across many, although not all, Russell Group universities.

No.	Name of Institution (and link to Twitter account)	Nos. of Twitter followers
1	Université de Nantes	2,817
2	Université Claude Bernard – Lyon 1	2,191
3	Université de Lille 1	2,125
4	Université Pierre et Marie Curie	2,103
5	Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3	1,762
6	Université Panthéon-Sorbonne – Paris 1	1,649
7	Université Lumière Lyon 2	1,648
8	Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse	1,632
9	Université de Lille 3	1,530
10	Université de Rennes 1	1,515

A similar survey, which was also published in January 2012, provides details of the ten most popular Facebook pages for French Universities.

No.	Name of Institution (and link to Facebook page)	Nos. of Facebook Likes
1	Université Lumière Lyon 2	8,775
2	Université Paris Sorbonne – Paris 4	6,797
3	Université Pierre et Marie Curie	6,763
4	Université Claude Bernard – Lyon 1	6,304
5	Université d’Auvergne – Clermont-Ferrand 1	5,456
6	Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC)	4,774
7	Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3	4,745
8	Université Panthéon-Assas – Paris 2	4,509
9	Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne	4,325
10	UVSQ	4,307

The automated translation of this page provides the ‘paradata’ for the survey:

• This ranking takes into account the number of “gross” of fans at the time of measurement
• we do not weighted by the number of students in the school.
• only the “official pages” are taken into account (or group or community pages …)

The article also provides a graph showing growth in the Facebook communities from October 20010 to January 2012.

Back in September 2011 I wrote a post entitled Bath is the University of the Year! But What if Online Metrics Were Included? In the post I whether since University league tables such as those provided by the Sunday Times and the Times Higher Education based on teaching and learning and research activities are well-established, in light of the acceptance of  the importance of the online environment in university activities  might we expect online metrics to be included in future surveys.

In light of these surveys across Catalonian and French universities I now wonder if  a future equivalent of  The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2010-2011 will include metrics for institutional engagement with social media services?

 

My Trusted Social Librarian

I’ve mentioned recently how I use the Smartr app on  my iPod Touch to view the content of links which have been tweeted.  I have set up a number of Twitter lists, such as my JISC list, which enables me to view the content of links posted from such official accounts but I tend to prefer the serendipity of reading content posted by people I follow generally on Twitter or particular groupings, such at attendee at events.

I tend to download new content in Smartr in the morning while I am waiting for the bus (using a neighbour’s WiFI which I can legitimately access using BTFON).  This then provides me with timely content to read on the bus travelling to work.

This morning I noticed that several of the interesting links which were being posted had been tweeted by @aarontay.  This may be because Aaron works at the National Library of Singapore so that when I am getting up it is the middle of the afternoon for Aaron. He is therefore more likely to be using Twitter to share resources of interest while colleagues in the UK will be describing what we had for breakfast!  However this is only partly the case  – I also find that Aaron’s Musings about Librarianship blog is valuable reading.

In light of Aaron’s proven track record in creating useful content and sharing links to content provided by others it occurred to me that it might be useful to create a Twitter list containing just Aaron’s Twitter account so that I would be able to easily see the content of links which Aaron has shared and read then, even when I am offline.

As can be seen from the accompanying image I am now able to view the content using Smartr.  It occurred to me that this is an example of how a trusted librarian contact can provide a ‘frictionless’ presence in social media.  Tony Hirst wrote about this recently in a post entitled Invisible Library Support – Now You Can’t Afford Not to be Social? which followed up on ideas previously described in a post which asked Could Librarians Be Influential Friends?

In his post Tony wondered:

“whether it made sense for librarians and other folk involved with providing support relating to resource discovery and recommendation to start a) creating social network profiles and encouraging their patrons to friend them, and b) start recommending resources using those profiles in order to start influencing the ordering/ranking of results in patrons’ search results based on those personal recommendations“.

Coincidentally earlier today I was looking for blog posts about the VALA 2012 conference which UKOLN Director Liz Lyon had spoken at recently. As illustrated my Google search provided a link which Aaron had recently shared on Friendfeed. My trusted librarian contact is helping me to find resources which may be of interest to me on Google as well as Twitter.

Last year Aaron richly deserved to win a Library Mover and Shaker award.  Although I’ve never met Aaron we have spoken on Skype and had discussions on Twitter and via our blogs.  I’m pleased that recent technological developments are now enabling me to gain value form the resouces which Aaron is ‘frictionlessly’ sharing on services such as Twitter and Friendfeed. Who are the other librarians I should also follow in order to ensure that I can keep up to date with new developments, I wonder? Or to put it another way, I have found one intelligent agent who searches the web and finds content of interest to me.  I’d like another one please!

 

Favouriting Tweets, Openness and Frictionless Sharing

Yesterday I favourited (or should I say ‘favorited’) a tweet from @lisaharris which had a link to an article on “Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. An hour or so later I received a direct message (DM) asking me if I was interested in exploring possibilities of joint work in this area.  We exchanged a few messages and agreed to discuss this more using a technology which allows for more in-depth discussions – the telephone :-)

It occurred to me that this is an interesting example of frictionless sharing - I spotted a link to an interesting resource and decided to bookmark it (using Twitter’s ‘favorite’ function) for reading later.  The bookmarking takes place in public (as, for example, I also do when I wish to bookmark web resources using Delicious or Diigo). And as a result of this public action Lisa Harris, who posted the tweet on Sunday morning, got in touch with me.

I have found that being aware of such Twitter favouriting activities has become easier following recent developments to Twitter’s mobile client.  As shown in the accompanying image (on the right if viewing this post in a web browser), such activities are readily accessible via the Twitter.com web site on a desktop PC.  But since, as with increasing numbers of  other Twitter users, a mobile device is now my preferred method of using Twitter, it’s the Interactions tab on my iPod Touch which typically alerts me to similar activities, as shown below.

From this we can see, for example, that @lualnu10 (Marisa Alonso Nunez) favourited and then retweeted my comment:

Great post from @ambrouk on “Why I Blog”. Good to see open reflections based on “vanalytics” & “pimpact” (TM Amber :-)  http://t.co/7oaEtc2N

It should be noted that access to such interactions are not available on all Twitter clients.  A lack of awareness of Twitter’s more subtle aspects is perhaps an example of why people may fail to ‘get” Twitter. As I mentioned in a recent post on Twitter? It’s Better Than The Most Things (According to Sturgeon)  there is a need to understand techniques for filtering Twitter content which are best exploited by using a dedicated Twitter client. In this example, however, we can see that there can be benefits in accessing content (interactions) which may not be available on all clients.

It is appropriate that the screenshot of recent interactions mentions Amber Thomas blog post on “Why I Blog“. In the post Amber explains why she is embracing ‘open practices in her role as a JISC programme manager. She cites Lou McGill’s definition of open practices:

By Open practices I mean a broad range of practices which have an ‘open’ philosophy, intention or approach [...] Informal and formal open practice takes place within wider societal contexts which are evolving rapidly. Open practices take place in, and are enabled by, a highly connected socially networked environment”

Amber’s post primarily addresses the open practices within the context of blogging, and covers associated metrics which can demonstrate the ways in which the content is being used and shared.  However as we can see Twitter also provides an example of open practices in which the value lies not just in the content which is shared in the 140 characters or the embedded links but also in simple frictionless sharing actions such as favouriting and retweeting.

Of course there may also be risks in public bookmarking activities: it you favourite a tweet on “how to deal with a difficult boss” you may be sending unintended messages to your manager! But open practices will always entail risks – I suspect the question will be what your personal attitude to risks are. And perhaps if you are an optimist you will see the advantages which can be gained in open practices, as I suggested in a post on “A Tweet Takes Me To Catalonia“.  But if you are at heart a pessimist, you may well worry about how your tweets could be used against you.   I can’t help but think that embracing open practices says a lot about the individual rather than the technology. On reflection, this is an over-simplistic analysis as I know several people I follow on Twitter who enjoy sharing their grumbles on Twitter, particularly related to public transport failures around the south west!

How Higher Education Uses Social Media [Infographic]: US and UK Comparisons

A post on How Higher Education Uses Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC] published two hours ago by Mashable.com provides an infographic on how US universities are using social media services.

Much of the content is based on bland summaries of how the services are being used: “Class announcements and discussions are shared on sites like Twitter” and unsurprising statistics: “Facebook is the most used social media tool in higher education”. However there were also some more detailed statistics, including the following information of the top social media colleges according to Student Adviser.

But how do these figures compare with leading UK universities? The findings for the five highest ranked UK universities according to the Sunday Times university guide for 2011 (as listed in Wikipedia) are listed below.

Institution	Facebook	Hubspot	Twitter	YouTube
University of Cambridge	128,310	-	27,399	2,341,548
University of Oxford	398,203	-	31,029	95,628
Durham University	8,785	-	1,980	256,933
LSE	38,730	-	4,660	91,964
University of Bath	37,744 7,032	-	10,440	48,697

As the original article is an infographic, it would be inappropriate to  comment on these findings further :-)

Further Reflections on My Predictions for 2012

“Massively Scalable Sensemaking Analytics”

A recent post outlined My Predictions for 2012. However rather than just posting some idle speculations on technological developments which I feel will have an impact across the higher education sector this year, I also pointed out that there was a need  at a later date to be able to identify ways of gauging whether the predictions were accurate or not.

This suggestion followed on from a recent post in which I described “The Need for an Evidence-based Approach to Demonstrating Value“.  This post was highlighted by Stephen Downes who introduced me to “people like Rudolf Carnap [who] used to talk about ’the requirement of total evidence’ and the ‘principle of indifference’” and went on to add that “These are as valid today as when they wrote it“. These two post inspired further discussion by Keith Lyons in a post on Probability and Sensemaking on the Clyde Street blog who cited a post on massively scalable sensemaking analytics which has links to other posts in this area including:

Sensemaking Systems Must be Expert Counting Systems, Data Finds Data, Context Accumulation, Sequence Neutrality and Information Colocation to new techniques to harness the Big Data/New Physics phenomenon.

This provides another take on my suggestion of the importance of Collective Intelligence. I’m therefore pleased to have been alerted to further relevant posts in this area. Indeed I can repeat the final two paragraphs in Keith’s posts as they are equally applicable to me:

It is fascinating that two early morning links can open up such a rich vein of discovery. At the moment I am particularly interested in how records can be used to inform decision making and what constitutes necessary and sufficient evidence to transform performance.

I have a lot of New Year reading to do!

But in addition to the analysis of big data in order to help make sense of future trends, it can also be useful to explore what other experts are predicting.

16 Predictions for Mobile in 2012

In my list of predictions I made uncontroversial comments regarding the growth in ownership of tablet computers. My interest was  not in tablet computers per se but in the implications of increased opportunities for content creation and curation, as well as content consumption which such devices would seem to provide.

On the GigaOm blog Kevin C. Tofel provides his more detailed predictions on development in mobile computing. Here are my thoughts on the implications of some of Kevin’s predictions:

Wearable computing becomes the next mobile frontier: Even more opportunities for content consumption, creation and curation. And, as explained in a post which described how “It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Fact That You Did It” favouriting a tweet or +1ing a post can be useful and valuable activities.

A jump in wireless home broadband adoption: More opportunities for online access in the home environment.

Windows Phone usage grows, but slower than expected: There will continue to be a diversity in devices, operating systems and applications, so it will be important to provide device- and application-specific services.

Windows tablets in 2012 will sell like Android tablets did in 2011. There will continue to be a diversity in devices, operating systems and applications, so it will be important to provide device- and application-specific services.

Research In Motion will no longer exist as we know it today: Some platforms will fail, so it can help to minimise the risks by minimising developments of platform-specific services.

Nokia uses Symbian as a backup plan (but doesn’t call it Symbian): See above.

The patent wars worsen: Sigh :-( The W3C will seek to avoid standards which are encumbered by patents, but the devices themselves, their networking connective, etc. may be covered by patents which could, as we have seen recently in the case in which Dutch court blocks Galaxy phones in parts of Europe | ZDNet UK, can lead to devices not being allowed to be sold. Best avoid developing device specific services, then!

Apple’s next iPhone will be the iPhone 4GS: When will 4G arrive in the UK, I wonder?

There will be an iPad Pro available in 2012: Ooh, so we should develop apps for the iPad, should we?

Android’s momentum will continue thanks to Android 4.0: Oh, and the Android?

Hybrid apps with HTML5 will be the norm: Maybe not!

Predictions from the BBC

The BBC News blog has a post entitled Mind-reading, tablets and TV are tech picks for 2012 in which a panel of experts “look ahead to the technologies that will change the way we live and work in 2012 and beyond“.

Mt predictions of the continuing growth in importance of tablet computers and social networks, including Facebook, are echoed by Robert Scoble who points out “in terms of the businesses I follow – start-ups – they’re all building into Facebook’s Open Graph technology” and adds “I think business is going to have to have a Facebook Open Graph strategy next year. Even if we’re ignoring it because it’s too freaky on the privacy side, they’re going to have to at least consider it.“.

I suspect that universities will be amongst those businesses which will be exploring how to make greater use of Facebook. As Scoble pointed out “I visited Yahoo recently and they said they’re seeing 600% more visits from Facebook because of it” – with an increasingly competitive market place across higher education I suspect we will be seeing even greater use being made of Facebook during 2012 and, as mentioned above, there will be a need to consider “the requirement of total evidence” and the “principle of indifference“.

But in addition to Facebook as an application environment, Scoble’s comment reminded me of the importance of Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol.  I wonder whether it will be possible to gather evidence of Facebook’s success by monitoring the growth of the social graph rather than simply the numbers of Facebook users.

The continuing importance of social networks was also the key message given by Tim Barker of Salesforce.com. Barker felt that:

The big one is the social enterprise revolution.

It’s the idea that you can see the power shifting from companies to consumers. There are more than 1.7 billion people on social networks now; Facebook is the size the entire internet was in 2004.

It’s really defining the way that consumers and customers interact with companies and what they expect from them.

Such issues are equally relevant for the university sector, in part because the increasing costs of going to university will mean that future intakes of students will see themselves regarding themselves as customers who are paying a lot of money for the ‘product’ they are buying. In addition something that both staff and students have in common is that we are all consumers when we leave our ivory towers and go into town for the January sales!

We may not like such terminology and be concerned about how the future seems to be arriving, but remember ”the requirement of total evidence” and the ”principle of indifference“.  On the other hand, perhaps we shouldn’t be so fatalistic about the future.  But if we do wish to build an alternative reality we will still need to gather the evidence.

Links to Social Media Sites on Russell Group University Home Pages

Providing a Benchmark of University Use Of Social Web Services

In a recent post in which I gave My Predictions for 2012 I predicted that “Social networking services will continue to grow in importance across the higher education sector“. But how will we be able to assess the accuracy of that prediction? One approach is to see if there are significant changes in the number of links to social media services from institutional home pages.

The following survey provides a summary of links to social media services which are hosted on the institutional entry point for the 20 Russell Group universities.

Update: The information published about Imperial College was incorrect. This has been updated.

Ref No.	Institution	Services	Type of Link	Screenshot	Icons for KCL
1	Birmingham	None
2	Bristol	None
3	Cambridge	[iPhone] – [iTunesU] – [YouTube] -[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [Flickr]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service
4	Cardiff	None
5	Edinburgh	None
6	Glasgow	[Generic bookmarks] – [WordPress] – [Facebook] – [Twitter] – [email]	Link to visitor’s own presence on social media service.
7	Imperial College	None [Delicious] – [Twitter] – [Digg] – [Stumble] – [Facebook]	Link to visitor’s own presence on social media service.
8	King’s College London	[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [YouTube] – [Favourites ] – [Digg] -[Delicious] – [RSS]		See sidebar
9	Leeds	[Facebook] – [Twitter]
10	Liverpool	None
11	LSE	[iTunesU] – [YouTube] – [Twitter] – [Facebook] – [Delicious] – [RSS] – [Flickr]	Link to page on institutional web site providing information about institutional use of social media services.
12	Manchester	[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [Google Maps]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
13	Newcastle	[Facebook] – [Twitter] - [YouTube] – [iTunesU]	Link to page on institutional web site providing information about institutional use of social media services.
14	Nottingham	[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [YouTube] – [Flickr] – [LinkedIn] – [FourSquare]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
15	Oxford	None
16	Queen’s University Belfast	[Facebook] – [Twitter]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
17	Sheffield	[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [YouTube]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
18	Southampton	[Facebook] – [Twitter] – [YouTube] – [iTunesU]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
19	UCL	[Twitter] – [YouTube] – [Facebook] – [Soundcloud] – [Flickr] – [iTunesU]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
20	Warwick	[Facebook] – [YouTube] – [Twitter] – [iTunesU]	Direct link to institutional presence on social media service.
	Total	59 64

A summary of the number of occurrences of the services is given below.

Service	Occurrences	Note
Facebook	14 15	Links to institutional Facebook page.
Twitter	14 15	Links to institutional Twitter page.
YouTube	9	Links to institutional YouTube page.
iTunesU	6	Links to institutional iTunes page.
Flickr	4	Links to institutional Flickr page.
Delicious	2 3	(1) Provides access to links provided by the Careers Service and (2) allows page to be bookmarked.
Soundcloud	1	Links to institutional SoundCloud page.
LinkedIn	1	Links to institutional LinkedIn page.
FourSquare	1	Links to institutional FourSquare geo-location service.
Digg	2	Allows site to be bookmarked.
WordPress	1	Enables WordPress users to create post with link to University home page.
RSS	1	Purpose of this icon is not defined.
Stumble	1	Allows site to be bookmarked.
iPhone	1	Link to iPhone app about University
Google Maps	1	Link to map of University.
Generic Bookmarks	1	Link to bookmarks providing access to several social media services.
Email	1	Provides an email facility.
Total	59 64

Discussion

If either all of the Russell Group University home pages had links to the same social media services or none did, this survey would be uninteresting. However since about 30% of the institutions do not have such links this seems to be suggesting that the value of having such links on a high profile page is not universally agreed.

For those institutions which do provide such links we can see that Facebook and Twitter are the most popular services, followed by social media sharing services. A number of services, including LinkedIn and FourSquare, have links from only a single institution.

It was also interesting to observe that although most institutions provided links to their institutional presence on social media services, a number of institutions used such links to allow visitors to provide links to the institution from the visitor’s own account, so that the institutional home page could be bookmarked or commented on.

Finally we can also observe how institutions label access to these services. This includes use of terms such as “Join us“, “Follow us“,”Find us on …“, and “xxx in the Social Media“.

From a user perspective we should also note that the different purposes provided by these links may be confusing. The norm is for links to provide read access to an institutional presence on a social media service. However in a number of cases the links are intended to allow users with accounts on particular services to bookmark or cite the institutional page on the service. Although this usage may be appropriate across a group of pages with the same purposes (for example, blog posts) this approach may cause confusion for a visitor who is either unfamiliar with the service or who expects the links to provide read access to the service.

Looking to the Future

This post has sought to identify patterns of usage of links to social media services on Russell Group university home pages and highlighted areas in which it may be beneficial for institutions to reappraise their uses of such services. However the main purpose of this survey was to provide a benchmark to help identify future trends in institutional use of social media.

Use of institutional home pages for such benchmarking can be beneficial since changes to institutional home pages will probably require approval at a senior level, and will therefore be less likely to reflect short term technological trends.

It will therefore be interesting at the end of the year to observe whether:

• The current popular social networking services continue to remain popular.
• New social media services are provided on social media services.
• The ways in which the links to social media services are labelled and the functionality they provide changes.

I’d welcome comments on patterns across the wider University sector.

“It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Fact That You Did It”

There’s a tendency to emphasise the benefits of tangible activities which involve significant investment of time and energy: carrying out the scientific experiments; interviewing the stakeholder communities; writing the research paper; developing the software; organising the events; etc. Outside the higher education sector we see this, for example, from the New Year’s Honours list which describes how “In total 984 people have been recommended to The Queen for an award. 70 per cent of the recipients are local heroes, who’ve undertaken outstanding work in their communities“. You don’t win an award or get promotion for a trivial piece of work, would you?

I wouldn’t like to be critical of people “who’ve undertaken outstanding work in their communities” – although, as described in the Observer “It is far more difficult to see the reasoning behind the award of an unprecedented third of knighthoods to bankers and businessmen, including Paul Ruddock, a hedge fund manager and Tory donor who profited from the collapse of Northern Rock“. But rather than make this obvious political point, I feel there is also a need to reflect on the implications of the minor decisions and actions we can all make which can have an impact across the society we live in.

This is clearly true in the parliamentary democracy we live in. Last year I took part in our democratic processes by voting in the General Election. And whilst it’s true that I am unhappy with the result and the subsequent consequences, I know that that’s how western democracy works and I’ll have to accept the implications of my vote for the Lib Dems, in order to keep out the Conservatives in Bath.

Voting in general elections every four to five years is accepted as how parliamentary democracy works in the UK. But it has recently occurred to me that we are also seeing similar effects happening in the online world, in which the small actions of individuals can have a significant influence in both the online and offline (real) worlds.

We see this with Google searches, in which the first sets of results will be affected by the numbers of links to the pages. People who create Web pages containing links to other pages are therefore helping to vote for pages which will be displayed at the top of a Google search.

The influence of individual Web page authors is now likely to be fairly minimal, as Search Engine Optimisers will be using a variety of other techniques in order to manipulate Google’s search algorithms. However the social media provides an alternative means by which simple actions can have an influence.

The University of Oxford’s Facebook page informs us that there have been “349,820 likes” and “5,549 are talking about the page”.

Looking at the most recent Facebook status update for the page, the season’s greetings from the institution, we can see that 707 people have liked this and 192 comments have been made.

The implications of lightweight activities such as liking a resources, favouriting a resource or following a user struck me after the recent update to the Twitter Web site (and Twitter client on my iPod Touch).

The activities of people I follow on Twitter are now highlighted so, as illustrated, I can see how the Twitter account for the J Paul Getty Museum has favourited a tweet from Carl Silva, how Garret McMahon has started to follow Elaine Byrne and Clay Shirky, James Burke and Mike Gulliver are now following Rupert Murdoch.

Back in June 2010 Christina Rogge suggested ways in we could go about BUILDING A COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE WITH TWITTER and, In November a post on the Mashable blog described How Hashtagging the Web Could Improve Our Collective Intelligence. Also last year Anthony Deacon suggested ways of Using Facebook Groups to Harness Collective Intelligence.

In the 2010 General Election there were 10,706,647 votes for the Conservatives, 8,604,358 for Labour and 6,827,938 for the Liberal Democratic Party (including one from me). There have also been 349,831 Likes of the University of Oxford Facebook page, also including one from me. I wonder if my trivial activities on social media sites will have a more productive outcome than my vote in the last election? And although we will still need people to “undertake outstanding work in their communities” we should also remember that, to a certain extent:

“It ain’t what you do, it’s the fact that you did it. That’s what’s gets results.“

The “it” can involve a mark on a voting slip or a click on a Like or +1 button. Activists understand the importance of the need to persuade people to exercise their vote at elections. We will need to understand the potential significance of  similar small-scale actions in the online environment.