Week 3: Forget social networks, think social impact

Hello everyone and welcome to this weeks blog post. this week in class we focused on 140528083034-google-entrepreneur-activist-wael-ghonim-time-gala-2011-620xa social media to make a change with the positive use of activism.

We looked at a very interesting TEDx talk where we saw how Wael Ghonim anonymously
created a Facebook page which helped spark the Egyptian revolution.

I have chosen to focus on a talk by This talk was given by Celine Schillinger at a TEDx . We see here an inspiring story of an actual, positive transformation powered by social networks.

Imagine living in a country where with one single bit of a mosquito and you could die. Through the disease Dengue. Half a million people contact this disease each year and are hospitalized.

So how do we make this less troublesome fore those people? Communication campaigns are a usual response. they are effective, but at a limited scale. in this day and age it would have to be social Media.

Celine Schillinger went back to the fundamentals, We need to listen to people communicating online because they can tell us the spots we are missing. Traditional health care has been uncomfortable with that.

So what did Celine and her team do to begin stepping outside this comfort zone? Over 3 months they collected data and posts where people where talking about the world “Dengue”. ( 250,000 comments in total)

They then mapped out the comments seen here below:

DATA (conversations)

The results showed that No institutional activist was in a “Dengue” conversation.

The Big Black Hole
Reason of social space where noting was escaping, this are was made up of thousands and thousands of people, but they were talking to no one but themselves. An untapped pool of engagement. A striking absence of colorization, the team figured out be simply harnessing out these conversations and connecting the people, Voices, brains they could contribute to fighting that disease. in took 7 months in total to connect these voices.