Howard and I debuted the white paper at JK Group’s Forum on Philanthropy in Princeton, NJ, where we led discussions on millennial generation workers, socially-wired CSR, and new trends in media and corporate philanthropy with attendees from Fortune 500 companies.

In preparing the paper, we studied several large American corporations who are using social media and who have found ways to involve employees, customers and stakeholders as they seek to achieve their CSR goals. We found that:

1. Companies are more comfortable using social media tools internally, but they’re waiting for external adoption by marketing before moving ahead to use them in CSR type efforts.
2. Employees seek choice and appreciate democratic participation.
3. Leadership is required to ensure continued participation in corporate giving campaigns, since employee participation is decreasing.
4. Both social media and traditional communications methods are used in employee giving campaigns and external outreach to communities.
5. Formal feedback loops for social media are the exception rather than the rule.

We also noted that there are different levels of commitment companies can make to using social media. As an example, some are taking advantage of intranet tools to allow employees to share and attract others to their causes on one end, while others actively encourage employees to alert their online connections of campaigns and request participation. Companies that are in what are traditionally regulated industries such as healthcare and finance are actively using social media as part of their CSR outreach, carefully finding the line between compliance and campaign. And some are stretching the boundaries – finding ways that their CSR efforts are part of their marketing, branding and core business efforts.

We invite you to read and comment on this paper. We know we are just scratching the surface of the efforts of companies across the world, and we consider this paper the beginning of a conversation around this topic, and not the definitive final word on the subject. Already, some interesting comments from our friend Allison Fine:

The report has terrific case studies of efforts by Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Pfizer, Western Union and many others. The efforts involve story telling through social media, fundraising match efforts, employee voting for donations. What I found most interesting about this report is what the authors call the rise of “citizen employees.” Employees using their passion, voices, votes, dollars to not only support causes but push their companies to be engaged and philanthropic. One thought I have: I wonder if or how these “citizens” extend their engagement into advocacy and even politics. We’ve seen companies push their employees into political giving in the past, might these employees do the same to their companies?

You can view or download the report here – Wired Workforce, Networked CSR

I don’t know if Sorkin plans a sequel, but surely the last three months in Facebook’s brief history qualifies for a sweeping cinematic treatment. Pity David Lean no longer walks this mortal coil, because the follow-up would clearly channel Lawrence of Arabia more than The West Wing. If Facebook is to help lead in the modern world, and to move beyond its mere multi-billion-dollar valuation to grasp the social value Zuckerberg is always talking about, the lessons of Egypt and the revolts roiling the wider Arab world must not go unlearned.

My friend Micah Sifry has a must-read post up at techPresident that serves as a sort of challenge for Facebook and he nimbly puts his finger on the nub of that challenge: the investors’ imperative to continue to grow the vast online service and reap ever greater revenue and profit rewards versus the more idealistic goal of building a vital social graph that encourages (and indeed, helps to guarantee) human freedoms, particuarly free speech. “While Facebook is a company built by young techies who care about openness and transparency,” writes Sifry, “it is also struggling to expand into countries like China, which abhor those values.”

This is a struggle that all nonprofits and NGOs – and the less formal movements beyond – must consider before investing their time, their networks, and their intellectual capital with Facebook and other social networks. While I cannot help but advise clients to “go to where to the people are” and therefore recommend a strong Facebook presence, I’m conscious of the fact that Facebook is a private enterprise, currently wired to make money and reward shareholders; and I think the ownership of data and relationships – the DNA of the social graph – is dangerously tilted towards ever-larger centrally-controlled private concerns that (despite great intentions) are non-democratic.

Sifry cites the example of the disappearance from the Facebook page of Cairo University professor Dr. Rasha Abdullah of a video showing the murder of an Egyptian protester by security forces. It mirrored Facebook’s takedown of Wael Ghonim’s iconic “We Are All Khalid Said” page last November – the page eventually credited with powering the January 25th revolt. “Young people using the site as a “democratic republic” need to know that their rights will be protected–including their privacy in settings where governments may not be so friendly to democratic conversations.” And indeed, Newsweek reporter Mike Giglio’s article in the Daily Beast shows how Facebook’s “policy” toward human rights campaigns and democratic organizers is so much chewing gum and bailing wire; it took the the behind-the-scenes ad hoc intervention of a Facebook executive in Europe to keep Egypt’s most important young activist on the site – and Ghonim has been effusive in his praise of Facebook as a brilliant organizing tool for young Egyptians. Giglio’s piece showed the ambivalence at the company.

“Facebook has seemed deeply ambivalent about this idea that they would become a platform for revolutions,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center on Internet and Society. “And it makes sense that they would be deeply ambivalent.”

The former Facebook official says of the company: “There’s a bit of schizophrenia in trying to think that you’re operating a neutral platform. People at Facebook definitely have pro-freedom views. And there’s also a desire to not get shut off.”

It’s understandable that Zuckerberg and Facebook face competing forces, and Zuckerberg has favored a more libertarian view towards his platform (he once griped about having to take down the pages of Holocaust deniers).

Yet clinging to an anodyne Terms of Service to bounce anything controversial seems – I dunno – so damned last year to me. The world is changing rapidly, and open social communications are leading the way, at least in part.

Those of us who reject so-called “hacktivism” displays of preening “civil disobedience” – you cannot legitimately support free speech by shutting down speech on the web by DDos attack, however much you disagree – are intellectually cornered, in a way. We need to root for the big semi-open platforms – Facebook, Google, Twitter – while wearing down the finish on our worry beads over their monied, private control. Yet it’s almost as if, in the argument over social media and its role in revolution and resistance, Facebook argues against itself. Witness the lame spokesman-speak evident in the company’s comment for a recent New York Times article on its reluctant role in Egypt:

“We’ve witnessed brave people of all ages coming together to effect a profound change in their country. Certainly, technology was a vital tool in their efforts but we believe their bravery and determination mattered most.”

Who wrote that, Malcolm Gladwell?

Compare that corporate vernacular mess to the enthusiasm of Wael Ghonim. When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked him, “Tunisia, then Egypt, what’s next?,” Ghonim replied succinctly “Ask Facebook.” He then went on to personally thank Mark Zuckerberg, and said he’d love to meet Facebook’s CEO. Clearly, Ghonim (who works for arch-competitor Google, ironically) was channeling the Mark Zuckerberg who, upon hitting 200 million registered users, placed Facebook at the center of social change: “Creating channels between people who want to work together toward change has always been one of the ways that social movements push the world forward and make it better.”

[As an aside, I'm very much looking toward some deeper reporting and analysis on the role of networked activism, social media, citizen journalism, and street-level organizing in the Egyptian revolution. Luckily, my friend Al Giordano and his compadres from the Authentic Journalism school - which I wholeheartedly support - are headed to the Middle East to find out. In an excellent post this week, Giordano wrote: "The media, including that part which has been sympathetic and in solidarity with the Egyptian revolt, has proved so far completely incapable at the task of coldly and rationally documenting what exactly the young organizers, authentic journalists, bloggers and other change agents in Egypt did, under extremely difficult conditions, to end a thirty-year dictatorship in eighteen days. That’s where the story remains, largely unreported."]

The choices Zuckerberg and Facebook make now really do matter for the networked future. Last week, Rebecca MacKinnon wrote a well-considered assessment for Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s second major address on Internet freedom:

Clinton was certainly right to highlight the fact that corporations running Internet platforms and telecommunications services have equally serious obligations to uphold universally recognized rights to free expression and privacy, particularly when governments fail to respect these rights. Companies around the world face strong pressure to censor, monitor, and silence users and customers when it suits government interests. The Egyptian government’s shutdown of Internet and mobile services could not have succeeded without the private sector’s cooperation. Research In Motion, the owner of BlackBerry, has been asked by a range of governments to comply with surveillance requirements.

Some activists are concerned that Facebook is making it easier for governments to track them down by enforcing terms of service requiring the use of real names, no matter where in the world you live. It was thus encouraging that Clinton called on companies to join the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder effort by companies, socially responsible investors, human rights groups, and academics to help companies make and uphold such commitments. Unfortunately only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have had the cojones (as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright would put it) to join.

Secretary Clinton’s speech was the most important a major American political figure has ever made on the subject of an open Internet and a more networked government. And it signaled a major step in the movement to open up governments – even superpowers – t0 the increased scrutiny and a participation of the citizenry.

Yet I thought the weakest part centered on private companies and their role in freedom movements, online and off – and the power relationship they have with data. Media technology is one of the strongest financial and cultural forces the U.S. has, and it’s clearly thought of as a vital national asset by the Obama Administration; Clinton’s speech (and ongoing State Department collaboration with social media companies) and President Obama’s well-publicized dinner with a gaggle of Silicon Valley machers were clear signals to this effect. So I guess it was understandable that Clinton didn’t push the private data control aspect too hard.

In any event, I’m fairly certain we cannot rely on government to guarantee a Facebook that’s as socially aware – as socially vibrant – as it is socially wired. No, that’ll take the crowd itself.

More than its investment bankers, Facebook listens to its network and adjusts its practices accordingly. Sure, the company has long been guilty of “launch, fail, react” cycles – but it has been responsive to its users. There have been many uprisings in Facebook’s brief history, and to Zuckerberg’s credit, he’s never played the Hosni Mubarek role.

Who knows if The Social Network‘s tale of youth and founding moments will grab the Oscar on Sunday, and in Egypt and Libya and Tunisia and Iran, I doubt if anyone cares. Sorkin’s film had a clever marketing tagline: “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” Nor do you create real social change without making the tough choices.

History is written too quickly for the filmmakers in 2011 – and Facebook’s own Tahrir Square is abuzz with change, hope, and major challenge to Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the social web.

Yet, Egypt is clearly a massive social media success, a world event that would not have been as speedy without digital communications – and may not have happened at all without the Internet. The revolution is just as clearly a product of two social factors beyond poverty and the desire for freedom – and those are demographics and digital communications. When Mubarak blacked out the Internet for five days in the wake of the initial protests, the streets filled and some observers said it proved that the uprising wasn’t a product of social media. But that ignored three years of organizing, including heavy use of both Facebook and YouTube. And Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who organized the original Facebook group that started this, is absolutely the face of the driving demographic force at work: he’s 30, totally wired, and seeking economic and social freedom. Ghonim deeply believed syllable today when he said with evident emotion: “If you want to liberate a government, give them the Internet.” So yes, this revolution was causewired.

Fittingly, Ghonim laid a bouquet of thanks at the steps of Facebook headquarters – for it was Facebook that served as a crucial tool in unifying young, professional, wired Egyptians. Here’s TechCrunch:

Ghonim was believed to have hosted the first Facebook page that organized the January 25th protests. When Blitzer asked “Tunisia, then Egypt, what’s next?,” Ghonim replied succinctly “Ask Facebook.” He went on to personally thank Mark Zuckerberg, and said he’d love to meet Facebook’s CEO. Ghonim says that he’s looking forward to getting back to his work at Google but he plans to write a book, “Revolution 2.0″ about the role of social media and the internet in political demonstration.

In the first week of the revolt, there was the usual rush to proclaim it yet another “Twitter revolution” – though Twitter was mainly a wonderful news source and external amplifier rather than a revolutionary weapon in this instance. Then came the predictable backlash. As Geoff Livingston wrote in the last week of January:

There’s a whole camp of Malcolm Gladwell-esque voices who bitterly claim only revolutionaries make revolts, social media has no valuable role in the discussion. To deny the use of new tools as exciting and noteworthy in a revolution is a mistake. It’s the equivalent of shooting the messenger, the poor soul carrying information between warring parties.

Exactly so. And knee-jerk anti-utopian reactions also ignored the years of organizing and work that created the canvas upon which the revolution was painted. As I wrote last week, connected young Egyptians like citizen journalist Noha Atef have been chronicling human rights abuses in Egypt for years, and disseminating the information via Facebook and YouTube. So NYU journalism professor and digital news evangelist Jay Rosen got the bullet point precisely right when he tweeted today: “To call it a Twitter Revolution: idiotic. That social media had NOTHING to do with it: … equally idiotic.”

Of course, there’s a temptation for all observers to think they’ve “got it” when a major event like Egypt unfolds. (Consultants may suffer from this tendency in greater numbers). So I’ll close with this bit of wisdom from Al Giordano, who trains citizen journalists for a living when he’s not reporting on politics in our hemisphere:

We all have a lot to learn from these heroes of our time, the multi-generational, ecumenical, multi-cultural participants in the civil resistance of Egypt. Now is not the hour to tell them what they must do or what solution they can or cannot accept. Now is the hour to listen, look, learn from  and study their moves, and apply them to our own lands and struggles.

You won’t find it on Time Warner or FIOS or Cablevision, but Al Jazeera’s English language television service is laying claim to the viewing loyalty of vast numbers of news-hungry, media-obsessed westerners following the incredible story of courage and revolution in Egypt.

More than any of the social media platforms we’ve come to worship with the ardent, almost physical hunger of Charlie Sheen expecting a delivery man, the humble satellite signal is rewriting the course of a region in which secular democracy is the dreamy contrast to the wakeful nightmare of dynastic strongmen or intolerant mullahs.

Al Jazeera. Television and a news network sympathetic to the cause of freedom – a polished and professional network endemic to the ethnic, religious, and cultural characteristics of the region, not an import. Remember that ten years ago, the Bush Administration targeted Al Jazeera’s journalists as enemies and bombed its bureau in Kabul. Now our State Department follows Al Jazeera as a matter of basic professional pratice, and you can bet it’s in heavy rotation on the Situation Room flat screens. And among those who follow international news and politics closely, Al Jazeera has become the channel of first choice; traffic to the English-language stream online has grown by 2,500 percent since last Friday. And Mohamed Nanabhay, the head of online for the English language channel, told the NYT’s Brian Stelter that the site’s live stream had been viewed over 4 million times since Friday, and that 1.6 million of those views have come from the United States. “It’s just a testament to the fact that Americans do care about foreign news,” he said.

Of course, Al Jazeera’s English-language service is different than its main Arabic-language programming yet we can’t help but marvel at the dead-straight reporting from Egypt (before the Mubarak government shut it down) and the fluff-free style. No studio talking heads, no all-star panels, no attempt to make the television experience look like an iPad app, with anchors pressing touch screens and sliding meaningless graphics around the viewing palette. Just waves of in-depth coverage, images backed by reporting. Yes, this is what big news television used to be – a bit unfashionable perhaps among a crowd of digerati obsessed with smart phones and Quora, but what a joy.

And to use the technical journalism term, it’s a hell of a story. What began with the slap of a protester’s face in a remote part of Tunisia has spread quickly across the North African Arab countries and is leaking into the gulf states – emboldened and knit together by digital communications tools, but mostly powered by a willingness to confront power and by the mass realization that what lies behind (powerless poverty) is far less compelling than a mysterious and dangerous future that may include self-determination.

We shouldn’t undersell the digital communications portion of this. Yes, Twitter may be playing almost no role inside Egypt over the past week, and Facebook may be blacked out, but it’s important to look back further into the roots of the revolt. And there, you’ll find upper middle class Egpytians and Tunisians (and connected people in other parts of the Arab world) organizing in Facebook groups. They’re only a part of the story, of course – most of the anger comes from the poor and the middle class living with high prices, low wages, and no political power. Nancy Scola pulled this quote from the op-ed piece by novelist Mansoura Ez-Eldin in the Times, and I think it says quite a bit about the current among young Arabic people who yearn to be both free and upwardly mobile:

Clearly, the scent of Tunisia’s ‘jasmine revolution’ has quickly reached Egypt. Following the successful expulsion in Tunis of the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the call arose on Facebook for an Egyptian revolution, to begin on Jan. 25. Yet the public here mocked those young people who had taken to Twitter and Facebook to post calls for protest: Since when was the spark of revolution ignited on a pre-planned date? Had revolution become like a romantic rendezvous?

Facebook groups were a huge part of this; democratic activists have been using the platform for years to gather support and share information. Connected young Egyptians like citizen journalist Noha Atef have been chronicling human rights abuses in Egypt for years, and disseminating the information via Facebook and YouTube. And even though the term “Twitter revolution” has the smell of the discredited about it, short messaging over networks is also a part of this – whether it’s texting or Twitter or the on-fly-invention allowing Egyptians to tweet by phone, cobbled together in an unusual collaboration between Twitter and Google. Further, I do think there’s something to Jeff Jarvis’s suggestion that in the future, connectivity to the network of networks – ordinary people’s ability to communicate – should be considered a basic human right. Of course, this raises the spectre of the vast private ownership of most of what we consider “the Internet,” and the inherent weakness of private companies interested in profit standing up to governments who demand censorship or monitoring, a topic covered in detail by Evgeny Morozov in his riveting challenge to cyber-utopians (and digital centrism), The Net Delusion.

Yet there is no debating two facts out of Egypt:

1. Mubarak shut down the Internet and digital life there is at a standstill.

2. The revolution not only continued under an Internet black-out, it picked up steam.

Some of it’s economic. While cell phone usage has grown wildly in developing countries and places like Egypt, where almost half the population lives in poverty, those phones aren’t fancy smart phones with Web access and social media apps; they’re cheaper basic models with pre-paid voice service. So while more educated and wealthier elements of Egyptian society may miss their access and suffer from a major Facebook jones, the crowds jamming Tahrir Square are powered by two alternative technologies – their feet, and their voices.

Or as a friend of Parvez Sharma put it from inside Egypt:

Fuck the internet! I have not seen it since Thursday and I am not missing it. I don’t need it. No one in Tahrir Square needs it. No one in Suez needs it or in Alex…Go tell Mubarak that the peoples revolution does not [need] his damn internet!

But it will, I think. It will when the job of building a more liberal civil society in Egypt replaces the job of taking down the dictator, when long-term organizing and creating progressive political parties is at hand. The networks of young organizers that relied on Facebook for years will be reactivated and empowered, and new voices will emerge.

That time is not now, however. Strangely enough, this is television’s time – and it’s clearly the cross-over moment for the news network that Bill O’Reilly bashed as “anti-America” just last week. No matter: the Drudge Report is now sending linky love Al Jazeera’s way. And this is good for our society, not just for the Arab world. In embracing Al Jazeera’s splendid coverage in large numbers over the past week, we’re laying aside a good portion of fear – and we’re turning a page to a new chapter in the post-post-9/11 world. Al Jazeera is good for us.

Watching Al Jazeera break through this week, I was reminded of a conversation I had with Reese Schonfeld 10 years ago at the launch party for his memoir about helping Ted Turner create CNN.  Schonfeld recalled how the CNN founders really saw themselves as revolutionaries – and how they thought of the news network as a kind of social enterprise aimed at changing the nation’s relationship to news and information, right down to Turner’s  famous banning of the word “foreign.” And the conversation recalled how Ted Turner introduced CNN to the world in 1980:

“We won’t be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event… and when the end of the world comes, we’ll play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee‘ before we sign off.”

That commitment to meaty, unending television coverage lives again, and let’s hope it spreads to our sets like democracy activism through the Middle East. With Al Jazeera, the tune may be a little different – maybe they’ll be singing Mawtini at the end – but the song remains the same.

Some lucky nonprofit or social entrepreneur is going to win a free free laptop and printer bundle courtesy of HP and CauseWired Communications!

But you’ll have to answer a key question first, in order to win: “How we’re going to use social media and web technology to change the world.” Drop your ideas and thoughts into comments, no more than 500 words please – and include a link to your organization or website.

Here’s the skinny on this give-away. It’s part of the HP Create Change effort. For every purchase from the Create Change site that is part of the HP direct purchase website, HP will donate 4% to one of the following seven nonprofits that you can designate. The nonprofits are: American Red Cross, CARE, DonorsChoose.org, Junior Achievement, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Susan G. Koman Race for the Cure, World Wildlife Fund.

You can download a widget for the HP Create Change effort form their site and follow their conversation on Facebook.

So what’s the deal with the contest? HP has asked me and a few social sector bloggers – Beth Kanter, Allison Fine, Katya Andresen’s Nonprofit Marketing Blog, Jolly Mom, and Amy Sample Ward – to ask our readers a question about social change. And then each of us bloggers will pick a winner from the comments on our blog.

Note: we’re not receiving anything. Only contest winners get the equipment. So let us know what you think!

Putting the imperative issue of civil rights and justice around the world for women and children front and center at this year’s Clinton Global Initiative required intense coordination between CGI and the Obama Administration – starting of course with the world’s foremost power couple.

But it also relied on some special sauce that was both unpredictable and incredibly effective: the distribution, discussion and amplification of social media.

This year’s CGI, which brought together more than 1,200 movers and shakers in New York in the cause of social change and international development, became a virtual boombox empowering women…and it’s a two part-story that reaches from the motorcades and presidential suites to digital alleyways of Twitter and blogland.

First, the top-down power messaging.

Fighting abuse and human trafficking of women and children is the signature issue for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who declared in her closing address: “we will put women at the heart of our efforts.”

Her husband, former President Clinton put the theme out front on the meeting’s first day: “Women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, and produce 50 percent of the food, yet earn only 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property. Whether the issue is improving education in the developing world, or fighting global climate change, or addressing nearly any other challenge we face, empowering women is a critical part of the equation.”

And President Obama tied the work of his late mother in microfinance to the “spirit of the Clinton Global Initiative” and work empowering women and assisting children. His Administration was omnipresent at CGI, which coincides each year with the opening of the U.N. General Assembly. Besides Secretary Clinton, speakers included Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, economic adviser Larry Summers, and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

One of the highlights was a peppery panel the first day, hosted by Diane Sawyer of ABC News, featuring Melanne Verveer, the State Department’s Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Zainab Salbi, founder and CEO of Women for Women International, and Edna Adan, director and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity and Teaching Hospital in East Africa, along with the head of the World Bank and CEOs of ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs. And the panel brought about one electrifing moment: when Salbi challenged ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s statement that funding isn’t the problem – a fairly typical assertion these days. Retorted Salbi, whose organization provides women survivors of war, civil strife and other conflicts with the tools and resources to move from crisis and poverty to stability and self-sufficiency:

But women still get very small, women and girls, get so very small, minuscule amount of funding…One cent of every development dollar, less than one cent goes to girls. So when you look at the larger scope of development money and how much is being invested in so many other things, women and girls get the least amount of funding. Money is not the problem in terms of if it’s available, but the political decision to say we need to invest much more in girls and women is not fully there yet.

You sensed some “shareholder value” vs. “humanity’s needs” tension on the panel, and indeed throughout this year’s CGI – where perhaps the corporate titans are taken for the infallible gurus of finance they were before the recession. Blogger Emily Davila at beyondprofit captured the panel’s vibe, the classic CGI combination of corporate powerhouses with practitioners:

On one hand, the unprecedented high-level private sector participation means that the women’s agenda has gone mainstream; real change will not happen if only women are talking to each other. On the other hand, the panel would not have succeeded if it hadn’t had two women from the trenches who could keep the discussion grounded in the life and death realities many women face.

Those life and death realities were emphasized in a news conference with Secretary Solis, who vowed that the Labor Department would pursue companies with slave labor in their supply chains, and Ambassador Verveer, who said that “modern-day slavery is a global scourge – no country is immune.”

Verveer and Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, who monitors human trafficking or the Obama Administration, clearly positioned the State Department as a new activist player on the issue. Indeed, Verveer wondered aloud if civil rights for women around the world hadn’t reached a “tipping point.”

If it has, the combination of star power on display at CGI and the bottom-up effect of social networking are playing complementary roles to U.S. government policy – a rare moment when an administration’s policy is in near-total sync with NGO and grassroots activists.

Star power also played a role. Film star Julia Ormond, who founded the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking at CGI two years ago, said that “meeting with victims and hearing their story just seals the deal.” And singer Ricky Martin made it personal – and advanced the storyline – during a shutter-clcking appearance in a special session, well-captured by Ari Melber in his Nation blog:

When Ricky Martin took the stage at the Clinton Global Initiative on Thursday, he did not sing, or dance, or even flash his trademark grin. Following the same stage directions as dozens of other celebrities who dropped by Clinton’s 5th annual global summit, from Brad Pitt to Bono to Jessica Alba, Martin struck a somber note while discussing the fight against human trafficking.

“I feel that my heart is going to come out of my mouth,” he said, recounting his sadness for the “millions of children that didn’t make it.” Martin was followed by testimony from a woman who, along with her two children, was kidnapped and held for four years of forced labor.

Martin made his remarks in what an interesting venue for Twitter reach. His own tweets – “on the CGI it’ll b my honor 2 present heroes tht r doing gr8 thinx agnst human trffckng.will xchange ideas n learn what else needs 2 b done!” – reached more than 338,000 followers.

But the Twitter king – actor Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) – was also making the CGI scene with his wife, Demi Moore (@mrskutcher); he has a Twitter-leading 3.6 million followers, whilst she pitches short messages to 2.1 million more. The couple tweeted their commitment:

Hubby & I have started The Demi and Ashton Foundation or The DNA Foundation as we like 2 call it. We’re ready 2 help bring an end 2 slavery

And Kutcher sent his followers to the live CGI video stream for the plenary on human trafficking. He also found time to tweak a more senior delegate to the meeting:

Listening to John Glenn mock the social web because he doesn’t understand it. I wonder if people mocked his space program.

Meanwhile, Moore introduced her followers to the nation’s leading journalistic voice on the issue:

Sitting in listening 2 a panel speak on investing in Women & Girls at CGI. In Nick Kristoff’s words Women are the solution not the problem!

Celebrity tweets clearly go to a rather broad audience, but I think they help to reinforce a potential cultural shift in how we view sex trafficking and women’s civil rights. Repetition from the likes of an A-list TMZ-type couple can puncture the social permafrost around a difficult issue like this, and deliver it to the mainstream.

Besides, there’s a core audience for information from CGI that is not celebrity-obsessed: writers, analysts and bloggers who work in and around the “social sector” year-round. To a large degree, they carry a lot of the heavy baggage for CGI in terms of disseminating and discussing ideas and innovation with a wider audience.

It’s this group that sent a couple of dozen correspondents (including me and my CauseWired partner Susan Carey Dempsey) into the chaotic and tightly-controlled CGI press pool – a large-scale operation that is understandably focused primarily on the video and still cameras, there to capture the bigshots and stars. And it’s this group that now uses blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to spread some of the bigger thoughts and developments to an activist group beyond the (occasionally oppressive) Sheraton press room. And you could see a the big theme of women and girls sprouting everywhere you looked.

For instance, tweets with both the #cgi09 hashtag and “girls” appeared more than 200 times over the last week, #cgi09 and “women” was tweeted more than 450 times, and #cg09i and trafficking more than150 times. This doesn’t include the celebrities, who tend to use Twitter more as a broadcast medium and don’t tend to use the hashtags to organize the conversation.

Relatively small numbers – #cgi09 never “trended” into the top ten of Twitter tags – yet the audience for international development and human rights was paying attention around the virtual network. And that’s important for an issue that’s just arriving at its moment, getting its wider organizing chops together under a new Administration with an activist State Department.

That’s important to an undertaking like CGI, I think. Despite its success and the billions committed to helping people around the world, building a network to carry its causes onward – even at smaller scale – is crucial to getting beyond the limitations of one organization, however large and high-powered. Upwards of 30,000 people watched the proceedings via the live stream, which CGI made available this year as a widget anyone could use on their own sites to carry the proceedings.

It isn’t about making the power brokers haul out their iPhones and tweet from the inner circle. As Bill Clinton said in his summation: “Twitter. That’s a funny word.” But he still got the importance of distributing the discussion; he said CGI generated 80 tweets per hour, and that the social network – inside and outside the hall – is heling to power the bottom of the innovation pyramid.

Chat Catcher

And it’s true, of course – at least on the surface. Most organization, especially large ones, do not race to take risks. But Godin’s piece is both simplistic and under-reported. Sure, it’s easy to say – as he does – that “non-profits, in my experience, abhor change.” Yet in my experience, they hate a change a lot less than failure – and they also hate change less than vast swaths of the corporate world (Wall Street and big insurance leap to mind).

It’s dismissive at the extreme to lob this kind of question: “When was the last time you had an interaction with a non-profit (there’s that word again) that blew you away?” Besides, Godin’s “success” metrics are wacky:

Take a look at the top 100 twitter users in terms of followers. Remember, this is a free tool, one that people use to focus attention and galvanize action. What? None of them are non-profits. Not one as far as I can tell. Is the work you’re doing not important enough to follow, or is it (and I’m betting it is) paralysis in decision making in the face of change? Is there too much bureaucracy or too much fear to tell a compelling story in a transparent way?

[snip]

If you spend any time reading marketing blogs, you’ll find thousands of case studies of small (and large) innovative businesses that are shaking things up and making things happen. And not enough of these stories are about non-profits. If your non-profit isn’t acting with as much energy and guts as it takes to get funded in Silicon Valley or featured on Digg, then you’re failing in your duty to make change.

Twitter followers? Digg counts? Pitching Silicon Valley VC’s? It doesn’t ring true. Sure, passion and the willingness to take risks matter – but I don’t think a simplistic techno-capitalist argument can be spread across the vastness of 501c3-land.

For one, I’m impressed every week by the work of nonprofits – work that does indeed, blow me away. And for another, there is some risk-taking out there – more and more capital directed toward experimentation – and some terrific advances in story-telling, organizing, fundraising, and activism. My book spent much 200 pages covering those stories. You want Twitter? Social change bloggers often dominate the serious discussion of social media’s impact.

This comment is particularly wrong-headed: “The only reason not to turn this over to hordes of crowds eager to help you is that it means giving up total control and bureaucracy.”

Undoubtedly, control and bureaucracy can be big problems with nonprofits, large and small. But does anyone now living believe that the most philanthropic nation in the history of the world should devolve its nonprofit and service sector into a crowd-sourced cyberlibertarian throw of the dice at utopia? Yes, $300 billion annually is less than 2% of GDP – but it’s a vital 2% for those who rely on the services and support that nonprofits provide.

I don’t – and I preach digital change to nonprofits every day. Change ain’t easy when the world keeps moving and you have the keep the lights on – ask the President.

Besides, nonprofits are way, way down the list of sectors that really abhor change. Wall Street, big insurance, government – now they really hate change. More nonprofits need to adapt, to experiment, to take risks, to embrace change. But they need to keep on providing services while they’re doing it.

I think the “non” in Seth’s post relates to its own currency frankly – it’s an old bromide that’s getting kinda stale.

UPDATE: Wow, lots of discussion in several interesting places. Let’s start with comments here. Seth responds to my post, and argues:

My point about VCs wasn’t that non profits should be raising money from them. It’s that we expect ‘real’ companies to be innovative risk takers, but somewhere along the way, the status quo for non profits has become to be boring.

And Seth’s basic point – that nonprofits accept a state of stasis too often (which I also agree with and have worked on for a decade) – won some positive comments, including Brad Rourke’s:

Seth’s description of the board meeting with the silent leaders felt eerily similar to meetings I have been in, where an uncomfortable proposition — perhaps as simple as “let’s eat our own dog food” — gets killed through inertia.

But others accused Seth of not tasting his own cooking – here’s Hildy Gottlieb:

I read the title and prepared to agree with Seth Godin on his post. Instead I laughed out loud. Why? Because Seth Godin is not on Twitter! He has a blog so he can blast out, but no way for readers to comment – no way for Mr. Godin to participate in the “social” part of social media.

And Sheva Nerad argued (persuasively, I think) that consumer marketing rules simply aren’t the same for nonprofits:

Godin’s rant about nonprofits completely ignores history of nonprofit institutions as petitioners as well as change agents. There is a different kind of risk taking involved when you’re marketing a luxury item, and social change is, alas, a luxury. NGOs have to be diplomats.

Further, says Kevin Williams, nonprofits (especially community-based organizations) have to adapt to survive, even if the pace isn’t always what we’d like it to be:

I work for a non profit and we embrace change. In face we have to in order to keep our advocates happy. The point that Mr. Godin missed is that non profits are constantly in the community talking and interacting with their advocates and donors. That’s where the real “change” happens.

Lots of other interesting comments – please read them and post your own. Elsewhere, some interesting commentary. At Beth Kanter’s place, there’s a great conversation around this – read all the comments and jump in – and here’s Beth’s take:

Change is hard for people and for people who work in nonprofits. Social media can also inspire timidness.  Seth’s painted a untrue picture of ALL nonprofits as deer frozen in the headlights. While there are many examples of nonprofits embracing social media and getting results with only a fraction of Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter followers – there are organizations that are not engaging.  If anything, Godin has got the attention of those who work in the nonprofit sector and are engaged in the social media conversation.  Whether or not that is only a small percentage of the nonprofit field or not remains to be seen.

Sean Stannard-Stockton did a special post on the controversy with lots of links, and takes the thoughtful middle road in judging the merits of the argument:

…we’ve come full circle. Tom, Beth and Seth are all right in my mind. Change is hard. Too many nonprofits (and philanthropists!) find change scary and by hunkering down instead of accepting uncertainty, they are wasting an opportunity to make a difference. Wasting an opportunity in the social sector means more people in poverty, fewer children with access to education, a quickly deteriorating environment. Seth is right to be pissed off.

But all is not lost! We are in the early stages of a technology and demographically driven Second Great Wave of Philanthropy. Books like Tom’s document the ways that more and more social change agents are getting comfortable with change and embracing new approaches.

Seth’s post was cranky, but he’s right. The work of nonprofits is too important for them to become paralyzed with fear.

Tom’s post was right as well. Everyone hates changes, not just nonprofits. And every day, more and more nonprofits are learning to overcome fear and more capital is being devoted to experimentation.

Geoff Livingston says Godin didn’t delve deeply enough before broadly characterizing nonprofits, and offers some examples of innovation:

My response to this is when was the last time Seth Godin did actual work in the field? Because I work with both nonprofit and commercial entities, and I can tell you which sector is getting it faster: Nonprofits. Much faster. If Seth did actual field work — instead of promoting his personal brand and ideas — he might have practical experience to cite in his lament. Instead, we have an uninformed opinion.

Consider the Humane Society’s efforts or LiveStrong’s or Live Earth’s and the National Wildlife Federation. These are all big brands that I’ve talked to in the past two weeks! Then there’s the CDC actively engaging to combat H1N1.

In any case, the conversation’s a worthy one. Sean’s right when he says that “we need to get comfortable with discomfort.” The blog/Twitter argument is a good one, so it’s fair to recognize Godin’s spark. As Beth says (in comments, above): “Anyway, he got us all blogging, twittering, and Facebooking about it …” Exactly. Thanks, Seth!

Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They’ll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They’ll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they’ll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.

What’s most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it.

For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good. Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list.

Please note this is not a top-10 list, nor are these listed in any particular order. It’s also incomplete. So we ask that you add to this conversation in the comments. If you’d like to Retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Take Social Actions: The nonprofit organization Social Actions aggregates “opportunities to make a difference from over 50 online platforms” through its unique API. It recently held the Change the Web Challenge contest in order to inspire the most innovative applications for that API. The Social Actions Interactive Map won the $5,000 first prize. The result is a virtual tour of the world through the lens of social action. “People are volunteering, donating, signing petitions, making loans and doing other social actions as we speak — all over the world. To capture the context of the where, this project uses sophisticated techniques to extract location information from full text paragraphs.” You can also join the Social Actions Community, which is powered by Ning…which now boasts more than one million individual social networks.

2. Twitter with a Purpose: This list could be exclusive to Twitter. The micro-blogging sensation was featured on our first two lists (a three-tweet), and it’s certain to be a fixture. From Tweetsgiving, the virtual Thanksgiving feast, to the Twestival, which organized 202 off-line events around the world to benefit charity: water, it’s become the de facto tool for organizing and taking action. Tweet Congress won the SXSW activism award, and celebrity Tweeps Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Rose Tweeted their two million followers about ending malaria. Max Gladwell recently initiated the #EcoMonday follow meme as a way to connect and organize the Green Twittersphere.

3. Visit White House 2.0: Inside of its first 100 days, the Obama administration has managed to set the historic benchmark for government transparency and accountability. The President’s virtual town hall meeting used WhiteHouse.gov to crowdsource questions from his 300 million constituents, complete with voting to determine the ones he’d have to answer. All told, 97,937 people submitted 103,978 questions and cast 1,782,650 votes. The White House continues to raise the bar with its official Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter channels. In so doing President Obama is not just setting the standard for state and local government in the U.S. He’s establishing the world standard. The Obama administration is spreading democracy not by force but through example. Because you don’t have to be an American citizen to be a friend or follower of White House 2.0.

4. Claim your Zumbox: What happens when all mail can be sent and delivered online to any street address in a paperless form? That’s the big question for Zumbox, which has created an online mail system with a digital mailbox for every U.S. street address. And while the answer to that question remains to be seen, it promises to be as liberating as it is disruptive. A key quality for Zumbox is that it’s closed system much like that of Facebook, only instead of true identity it’s true address. This will enable people to better connect with their communities including their neighbors, local businesses, and the mayor’s office. The primary agent of change, though, might not be that this uses street addresses but that it enables direct and potentially viral feedback, which is a virtue that e-mail and the USPS do not offer. The first methods are to request exclusive paperless delivery and to block a sender, but others are certain to evolve such as real-time commenting and ways to share mail with friends, family, and colleagues. Welcome to Mail 2.0. (Disclosure: Zumbox is a client of Rob Reed, the founder of Max Gladwell.)

5. Host a Social Media Event: This is the year of the social media event. No meaningful gathering of people is complete without an interactive online audience, especially when it’s so easy and cost effective to pull off. Essential tools include a broadband connection, laptop, video camera, projector, and screen. Add people and a purpose, such as entrepreneurship. Promote it through social media channels, and you have a social media event. A recent example in the green world is the Evolution of Green, which was hosted by Creative Citizen, a green wiki community. It celebrated the launch of a new Web property, EcoMatters, while also establishing a new Twitter tag. By posing the question, “How can we go from green hype to green habit?” and including the #GreenQ hashtag, it sparked a conversation between attendees and the Twittersphere in real time. Thus was born a new mechanism for getting answers to green questions via Twitter.

6. Travel the World: More than anyone else, Tim O’Reilly knows the potential for social media to change the world. In his opening keynote at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, he called for a new ethic in which we do more with less and create more value than we capture. This provided the context for SalaamGarage founder Amanda Koster, whose presentation followed O’Reilly’s. The idea is that social media has enabled each of us to have an audience. Whether through Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or a personal blog, each of us can have influence and reach. What’s more, it can be used for good. SalaamGarage coordinates trips for citizen journalists (that means you) to places like India and Vietnam in conjunction with non-government organizations like Seattle-based Peace Trees. The destination is the story, as these humanitarian journalists report on the people they meet and discoveries they make. Their words, images, and video are posted to the social web to gain exposure and because these stories just need to be told.

7. Build It on Drupal: You may not have noticed, but the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) has quickly become the dominant player on the social web. While we still prefer WordPress as a strict blogging application, Drupal has emerged as the go-to platform for building scalable, community-driven Web sites. It powers Recovery.gov, a key part of President Obama’s commitment to transparency and accountability. PopRule uses it as a social news platform for politics. And Drupal will soon become the platform for Causecast, a site where “media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose.” This is especially significant because Causecast CEO Ryan Scott is transitioning the site off of Ruby on Rails because Drupal has proved more efficient, user friendly, and cost effective. (Disclosure: Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed is co-founder of PopRule.)

8. Green Your iPhone: Looking for an organic diner within biking distance that has a three-star green rating? There’s a app for that. It’s called 3rd Whale, and you can download it for free. (Except that the star rating is actually a whale rating.) Complete with Facebook Connect, this iPhone app locates green products and businesses in 30 major North American cities. It uses the iPhone’s dial function to select a category (food), sub-category (restaurants), and distance (walking, biking, or driving). In Santa Monica, this might give you Swingers diner for its selection of veggie and vegan fare. You could then get directions from your current location using the iPhone’s built-in Google map, rate your experience on the three-whale scale, and write up a quick review. 3rd Whale recently released a new feature that integrates green-living tips, which can show how much energy or waste you’ll save by taking a given action.

9. Unite the World Through Video: Matt’s dancing around the world video inspired many to tears. Today, more than 20 million people have viewed his YouTube masterpiece, where he performs a kooky dance with the citizens of planet earth. The most recent example of this approach is Playing for Change, which connects the world through song. The project started in Santa Monica with a street performance of the classic Stand By Me and expanded to New Orleans, New Mexico, France, Brazil, Italy, Venezuela, South Africa, Spain, and The Netherlands. The project was superbly executed via social media, complete with a YouTube channel, MySpace, Facebook, and Blog. It’s received tremendous mainstream media exposure and also benefits a foundation of the same name.

10. Rate a Company: The conversation about corporate social responsibility (CSR) takes place across the social web on blogs, Twitter, and YouTube, but a central hub for this information and opinion is still to be determined. SocialYell seeks to address this by building an online community around the CSR conversation, where users can submit reviews of companies together with nonprofit organizations and even public figures like Michelle Obama. The major topics are the Environment, Health, Social Equity, Consumer Advocacy, and Charity. The reviews are voted and commented on by the community in a Reddit-like fashion with both up (Yell) and down (shhh) voting. The site is relatively new and still gaining traction, but there’s no question that a resource like this is needed to shine a bright light on CSR and and other related issues.

11. Publish a collective, simultaneous blog post on a universal topic: As Nigel Tufnel might say, this list goes to eleven. Let the #10Ways conversation begin…

Final note: This is Max Gladwell’s third list of “10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media.” The first was posted a year ago today on Sustainablog.org, and the sequel followed five months later. If a single headline can capture the Max Gladwell raison d’etre, this is it.

Besides, notes Newmark, there are already many outlets for service and involvement, including some of the organizations and sites profiled in CauseWired. He lists five ways for Americans to get involved with a “craigslist for service,” and notes the value of the public pledge in encouraging others:

To make this really happen, people need to declare themselves publicly, to commitment to some form of service, and follow through. This is like the pledge system of the Clinton Global Initiative, or pledgebank.com, or thepoint.com. We’ll need something which scales to the tens of millions, which also plugs into the social networking tools people actually use.

He’s got a point: the best in social networking involves the abandonment of anonymity and the embrace of the self in a very public fashion. Clearly, Obama’s campaign tapped that next-stage, public Internet over the past two years – and there’s real value to leveraging what has been a political campaign into more of a national movement. As Newmark says: “I feel that we’re entering a new time of civic engagement, where people can help others out in small or big ways.”

Online social activism portal Change.org, whose origins predate (by just a little bit) the theme of the Obama ’08 campaign, has opened up a super-connected suggestion box on national policy – and if they’re smart, the new Obama Administration will dive right in. I can almost picture a Capraesque scene in the Cabinet Room come January: Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel dumps a huge hamper of Change.org suggestions on the big, shiny and table and calls on the startled Secretaries to “dig in” as President Obama nods in approval.

Not that you’d divine that sort of attitude from the dot-gov side of the Change domain spectrum: Change.gov is a handsome, well-designed billboard with a light Obama agenda, the latest transition news, and the ability to apply for jobs and send in suggestions. It’s the polar opposite of the much-lauded MyBO site of the campaign, where the campaign allowed organizers to – well – organize publicly using the Obama team’s digital plumbing. And no, your once-prized MyBO log-in and identity won’t work in the Office of the President-elect.

I don’t think you can fault the transition team of Change.gov, especially given the campaign’s track record on balancing real online collaboration with total control over the big brand messages – and I can see some of the wisdom in its skeletal “no drama” approach.

But man, imagine if they’d gone with the Ideas section of Change.org?

I was hanging out over there earlier today and the breadth of the suggestions for the Obama Administration – most of them pretty clear from Obama supporters, as least in the general – was pretty amazing.

The site throws Barack Obama’s quote on open government right up top – both an as encouragement and as a not-so-subtle challenge: “I will open the doors of government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy again.”

The ideas number in the hundreds and they’re divided up by causes – economy has the most suggestions, followed by energy, government reform and education. The suggestions are voted on by Cause.org members – high vote-getters include: closing Guantanamo Bay, gay marriage initiatives, fighting global warming, and legalizing marijuana. Yeah, it’s a young liberal crowd on the whole. But there are some really interesting ideas – I was taken with the suggestion of Michael Kleinman, who describes himself as an aid worker from L.A.:

The most effective reform would be to establish a new cabinet-level Department of Development, with the power to coordinate US foreign assistance across and throughout the Government, while also implementing a long-term, strategic approach. USAID, as a sub-cabinet agency, lacks the ability to play such a role.

There are a lot of efforts out there to keep the super-wired organizing work that came to life around the Obama campaign alive – and even grow it into a real national movement that transcends a mere election campaign for a single politician. What Al Giordano is attempting with his network of Field Hands is a good example of the post-election “keep-it-going” mindset. It’s light on any unity of policy yet, but as Giordano points out, people are talking actively about their own roles as participants in democracy – something that is, frankly, a pretty new concept for a lot of Americans. And that’s what the Change.org transition site alternative is all about – a potential complement to the Change.gov side, the “outside” to the politician’s “inside.”

“I see it as parallel attempts to get people involved in civic life again — one through the public sector, the other through the private,” said Josh Levy, editor-in-chief of Change.org in an email. “I think they can work together.”