From an interesting study on a social-networking trends, released in the last week by web traffic trackers comScore, Inc. …

A new survey by comScore, Inc. shows that Facebook and Twitter access via mobile has grown by triple-digits in the past year. Via the release:

The study found that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347-percent jump.

Are you surprised, or not surprised? And what could that mean for us? Some thoughts after the jump.

The continued, bounding growth of Facebook and Twitter means more and more people will able to see what others are posting about or urging them to do for a cause or charity they follow while on the go — which can be a great thing. Perhaps your friends are tweeting about texting a certain short code to donate money, and you can do that without hopping on your computer. Or maybe an activist group is tweets about the locale of a rally and you’re in the neighborhood.

Last fall, in our first set of Think Social Blueprints for Social Media in the Public Interest, we wrote about the possibilities of mass texting and social media technologies in helping “launch and participate in fast-formed organizing campaigns.” Citizen mobilization around news events is nothing new, we wrote at the time, but with platforms like Twitter used as an organizing tool — and one who’s use while on-the-go is apparently growing exponentially — “there’s potential for rallying people to take action at unprecedented volumes, and from anywhere in the world.”

To be sure, just because more people are using Facebook and Twitter on their smartphones doesn’t mean they’re more active — or even active at all — in the social-media-for-social-good world. How many people are simply TwitPic’ing something funny they see while waiting for the train, or playing FarmVille? (That said, as we also observed last year, you can play FarmVille for good.) But based on sheer numbers, the fact that there are more people using Facebook and Twitter with their mobile browsers means more of the people who are actively tweeting about rallies or organizing charity events through Facebook groups will be able do those activities more easily from, well, anywhere in the world.

Let us know what you think.

In a night of quote-worthy Oscar speeches, from Mo’Nique to “Music By Prudence’s” Kanye moment, activist Ric O’Barry’s short-code spoke louder than words.

O’Barry held up a sign that said “TEXT DOLPHIN TO 44144” when he and others involved in the making of ”The Cove” — a documentary about efforts to stop an annual dolphin hunt in Japan — took the stage for their Best Documentary Feature win at Sunday night’s 82nd annual Academy Awards.

Following O’Barry’s instructions signs you up for the film’s mobile campaign, connecting you to more information on the film, trailers, a petition against the hunt in Taiji, Japan, and other materials to promote “The Cove” and the cause behind it.

Some viewers watching on television might not have caught O’Barry’s message; the cameras cut away soon after he raised the sign above his head. The Academy Awards show producers, after all, are famous for trying to keep things short and on schedule — and relatively politics-free.

Next in our series “Trends that are Shaping Social Media in the Public Interest” is Social production or mass collaborating, which occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature, to create a product of significant value and complexity. Wikipedia is probably the best known example on the Internet, but many more in almost every area of endeavor are being organized by individuals, organizations and companies.

This participatory, reciprocal service of crowd-sourcing has enabled organizations to tackle ambitious, large-scale projects, otherwise near impossible to do with just a staff and limited budget. As the motto to mass-sourced reporting service Help a Reporter Out (HARO) says, “Everyone is an expert at something.” While recruiting many people to pitch in to actualize a product is not a new idea, the examples we found in the past year highlight how new technologies allow projects of greater scale and ambition to become reality.

Examples include:

• This May, TED launched an ambitious, mass-sourced endeavor to translate TEDTalks into the world’s languages. Run from a platform by dotSUB, version 1.0 of TED’s Open-Translation Project launched with 300 translations in 40 languages, and 200 volunteer translators. To start, a handful of talks were translated professionally into 20 languages, but going on the project will be completely reliant on volunteers from Beijing to Beirut, who use a platform created by TED and technology partner dotSUB. As of this past weekend, there were TEDTalks in 58 languages, from 1267 translators providing 2907 translations. On the TED site’s translations page, there are charts that illustrate how many translations are in each language, and profiles of translators.

Architecture for Humanity is dedicated to “building a more sustainable future using the power of design,” which includes not-for-profit projects that range from schools in Uganda to skate-boarding-and-life-skills center in Afghanistan to community-designed housing in the American Southwest. Part of that mission includes its Open Architecture Network, an open-source platform where designers, educators and non-profit organizations who have volunteered their time and resources can share and comment on each others projects, and collaborate with each other.

• The power of crowds can also be seen in one aspect of PatientsLikeMe, a network of web communities where members are united by their chronic and terminal illnesses: the data that members provide is funneled to research institutions and companies, who then use the information to improve care and treatment for those diseases. Money that these partners pay for the data then goes toward running the PatientsLikeMe online communities.

Read the full Social Media Blueprints report and learn about the other trends that are shaping the use of social media in the public interest:  Social Media Blueprints 1.0

Social looping occurs when organizations meaningfully connect people to the impact their participation (financial, social or political) has created for a cause and provide tools to inspire and enable those people to reach out and encourage their social graph to take further action.Why have online initiative such as charity: water, DonorsChoose.org and Kiva grown so fast and generated such brand affection? Effective social looping has a lot to do with it.

Supporters of a cause or charity want to know the destination of their donations, and non-profit organizations and donation platforms like charity:water, DonorsChoose.org and Kiva are answering that question with information and powerful storytelling and images. Furthermore, they are making it easy for their participants to share specific people and initiatives in need and the celebrate the successes along the way.

Examples include:

• Online microfinance platform Kiva.org posts on its website profiles of entrepreneurs, so lenders can see who they are donating to. There are also profiles of lenders in the community, and background information on the microfinance institutions that receive the donations and send them on to the entrepreneurs. Kiva also posts statistics and financial information online, with an explanatory section on “How Kiva Works”; and Kiva representatives say that there will be efforts for even greater transparency, including a contest for user-submitted videos about the Kiva model, after criticism that earlier versions of Kiva.org’s language suggested that lenders were indeed able to donate money to a particular entrepreneur (much like the “sponsor a child” charities of last century).

• Other fast-growing charities that try to illustrate where exactly donations are going include Invisible Children, a non-profit that spreads awareness about child soldiers in Northern Uganda, educational charity DonorsChoose.org, and charity: water.

• Invisible Children, for example, as part of its Schools for Schools campaign, blogs photos of schools being built thanks to donations from Invisible Children supporters.

• DonorsChoose.org posts photos and thank-you notes from the students whose classrooms received requested school supplies or were able to go on an educational field trip based on donations from the site.

• And on its web site, charity: water uses Google Earth maps to track progress of wells and other charity: project projects and their partners across the world.

Read the full Social Media Blueprints report and learn about the other trends that are shaping the use of social media in the public interest:  Social Media Blueprints 1.0

Active witnessing occurs when individuals or groups share information and stories about important and often dramatic events through the use of digital tools such as cellphone cameras and social media utilities including blogs, microblogging (Twitter, Tumblr), and social media platforms and networks (Facebook, Myspace).

Active witnessing has been around since before the time of Homer and the Illiad, but never before have so many people been able to share so much information and experience so fast and to so many people. The substance, speed and scale of active witnessing are changing what is “news” and what grabs the world’s attention.

Active witnesses living in places characterized by oppression and violence are increasingly being targeted by their governments and opponents of free expression. But, the same social networks which help active witnesses get information out to the world are now mobilizing to protect them—letting their oppressors know that they are not forgotten.

Examples include:

• An Iranian Twitter user who went by the name “persiankiwi” became one of the most symbolic voices of the so-called Green Revolution during Iran’s contested presidential elections this year. Persiankiwi was frequently retweeted by followers and cited by the international press for his or her tweets that illustrated the increasingly dramatic events that followed the election, chronicling in 140 characters or less the heady atmosphere of citizens’ pro-democracy mobilization and the terror of violent government crackdown. When persiankiwi’s Twitter account fell dead after this June 24th tweet—Allah – you are the creator of all and all must return to you – Allah Akbar -#Iranelection Sea of Green—followers feared the same fate for its author, whose identity and fate is still unknown.

• Examples of the growing movement to memorialize and advocate for persecuted bloggers include the Mideast Youth Foundation’s March 18 Movement, which asks for an international memorial day set to the date of death of imprisoned Iranian blogger Omid Reza Mir Sayafi; another Mideast Youth campaign, “Free Kareem,” advocates for the release of an imprisoned Egyptian blogger.

• News aggregator and online advocacy site Global Voices; Vietnamese reform party Viet Tan’s campaign encourages supporters to petition politicians for a Vietnamese internet freedom resolution and to write letters to imprisoned bloggers; and action from journalists’ rights organizations like Committee to Protect Bloggers and Reporters without Borders.

• A long-established “active witness” network is Witness.org, a non-profit that empowers people to tell stories of human rights abuses through video technology. Inspired by founder Peter Gabriel’s 1988 Human Rights Now! Tour—where the musician brought along a Sony Handycam to document stories of people he met—today the WITNESS.org site hosts an online video-sharing community where members can upload videos, audio and photos. This initiative, dubbed “the Hub,” was prompted two years ago by the growing popularity of video and camera-enabled phones.

• Ushahidi means “testimony” in Swahili, a fitting name for a website developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the 2008 presidential election. Ushahidi has spawned Ushahidi Engine, a platform that allows people worldwide to set up personalized ways to gather and map news via mobile phone, email and the web.

Read the full Social Media Blueprints report and learn about the other trends that are shaping the use of social media in the public interest:  Social Media Blueprints 1.0

Retail giant Target invites Facebook users to choose how it gives away $3M in charitable donations.  For a short time, the company let Facebook users decide how to allocate this money to a list of 10 charities.

June 13th

The Green Revolution in Iran beginning on June 13th goes global faster, wider and longer because of courageous active witnesses in Iran and dedicated organizers leveraging social media around the world.

July 1st

With a wink and a nod to yippie culture jammer Abbie Hoffman who famously wrote Steal this Book in 1970 which went on to become one of the most widely banned and widely read books of its time – we at ThinkSocial want you to Steal these Ideas.

Luckily for causes ranging from education to health to the environment – many of you already are stealing ideas, language, applications and emerging best practices in social media for the public interest with impressive early results.

In the ThinkSocial Blueprint we just released with your help we have taken a first step at identifying the most  promising developments in social media and are sharing the emerging lexicon and frameworks that can help all of us scale what is working well.  In the coming days we will be breaking the report down and sharing specific concepts individually.  This should help them be more digestible, allow us to update each concept with new developments, and stimulate more conversation and feedback.

Here is a list of all the ten concepts we will be featuring in the coming weeks:

• Active Witnesses/ Active Witnessing
• Social Loops/ Social Looping
• Social Production/ Mass Collaboration
• Social Alignment/ Social Aligning
• Social Transactions/ Social Transacting
• Flash Activism/Instant Mobile Organizing
• Internet Censoring  and Monitoring
• Causecasting
• Open Government/ Open Source  Government
• Leapfrogging &  Digital Divide 2.0

We will also begin to more regulary share links to new developments in social media for public purpose — so if you have developments  that you believe are important please share them.

Today we are very proud to announce the inaugural ThinkSocial Award Winners and also release Blueprints 1.0, a report detailing trends in social media for the public interest.

Winners of the inaugural 2009 ThinkSocial Awards are:

• Kiva.org: a peer-to-peer micro-lending web site, enabling entrepreneurs in developing countries to receive loans from lenders around the world.

• SocialVibe: helping brands direct a portion of their advertising budget into branded activities on social media platforms.

• The March 18th Movement: Mideast Youth seeks to expand the world’s understanding of bloggers as de facto journalists, and extend the protections normally accorded to journalists to all those who share information and stories of repression and corruption online.

A special commendation award is also being presented to:

• Amanda Rose: the founder of Twestival Global and Local, which is a concurrent series of offline events for charity, organized by volunteers in cities around the world via Twitter.

As part of the selection process the team at ThinkSocial has also prepared a report that provides a detailed analysis of each of the award recipients, together with a top ten list of trends identified following an extensive research phase.  Highlighted trends from the report include:

• Active Witness/Active Witnessing: Active witnessing occurs when individuals or groups share information and stories about important and often dramatic events through the use of digital tools.  Examples include long-established “active witness” network Witness.org, a non-profit that empowers people to tell stories of human rights abuses through video technology.

• Social Production/Mass Collaboration: Social production or mass collaborating occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature, to create a product of significant value and complexity. Examples include Invisible Children, a non-profit that spreads awareness about child soldiers in Northern Uganda, educational charity DonorsChoose.org, and charity: water, which uses Google Earth to track the progress of its projects.

• Social Alignment/Social Aligning: Social aligning occurs when institutions engage with their constituents, consumers or other important stakeholders through social media to identify and take collective action on shared goals—often goals with a public purpose.  Examples of social alignment include retail giant Target who recently gave 5% of its profit, or about $3 million a week, to charity. For two weeks this past May, Target recruited Facebook users to help the corporation decide which ten charities would receive the “Bullseye Gives” funds and what percentage of the money the selected charities would receive.

• Social Transacting/Social Transactions: Social transacting occurs when people spend time or money online engaged in activities that generate financial and social value for causes. Social transacting is demonstrated in Zynga’s popular virtual farming game, FarmVille, where players can purchase certain charity-linked items with their virtual currency. Zynga’s “Sweet Seeds for Haiti” promotion, where 50% of proceeds benefited Haitian charities FONKOZE.org and FATEM.org, generated $487,000 for the charities.

Thanks to our Cochair Sponsors, Facebook, Meebo, Pepsico and the Loreen Arbus Foundation for supporting the inaugural ThinkSocial Awards.

Thanks also to the Surdna Foundation and Attention for their ongoing support.

You can download a full copy of the Blueprint for Social Media in the Public Interest 1.0 Report here: http://think-social.org/awards/blueprints

The ThinkSocial team is very pleased to announce that Facebook, PepsiCo, Meebo and Loreen Arbus Foundation have signed on as corporate Co-Chairs for the first Think Social Awards, which will recognize outstanding achievement in the use of social media for the public good.

The Awards and an accompanying report will be presented next week at the Paley Center for Media’s International Council (IC) Meeting November 19th and celebrated at an event November 20th that will close the IC Meeting.

The participation of these market leaders in social media and marketing as Co-Chairs sends a powerful message that business leaders support the important growth of social media for public purposes and recognize the value ThinkSocial is contributing to this emerging field.

ThinkSocial at the Paley Center for Media produces research, events and online experiences to advance the use of social media and emerging communications technologies for public purposes.  Over the past two years the new communications platforms and applications collectively known as social media have taken center stage in the United States and the world’s democratic discourse and cultural life.  Much as the rise of broadcast media transformed economic, political and social institutions and practices – the use of social media is creating new turning points across a wide range of human activity.

The Paley Center for Media, the Co-Chairs, and the growing ThinkSocial community are working together to highlight and support the people, organizations and entrepreneurial companies that are demonstrating truly innovative and courageous leadership in the use of social media for a wide range of public purposes.

To this end, on November 19th 2009, at The Paley Center for Media’s International Council Meeting, ThinkSocial will present Awards and release a report designed to share emerging best practices in ways that inspire and inform more people in the US and around the world to use social media for deserving social, economic and environmental initiatives.

A network of outstanding social media and public sector leaders has collaborated with the team at ThinkSocial to identify thirty-three nominations, which together represent powerful models for how social media can be used to address global problems.  (An international focus was chosen for the first ThinkSocial Awards to correspond to the Paley’s Center’s International Council Meeting.)

The deserving submissions range from bloggers in Iran to micro-finance networks in Africa, to application developers and trainers operating in the US and in the developing world. All share the common thread of applying elements of social media for the public good.

Today, in addition to announcing the Think Social Co-Chairs we’re excited to also share the outstanding leaders from the fields of social media and social innovation who are participating as Honored Jurors.  They include:

• Randi Zuckerberg – Facebook
• William Paley, Paley Center Board Member
• Uzodinma Iweala, Author Beasts of No Nation; Columbia Medical School
• Beth Kanter – Beth’s Blog
• Kenny Miller – EVP Creative, MTV
• Rob Kramer – Founder and CEO of PopRule
• Tom Watson – CEO of Causewired
• Catherine Geanuracos., General Manager, Live Earth
• Mahyad Tousi, Co-Founder at BoomGen Studios
• Ami Dar – Founder and CEO, Idealist
• Ian Schafer – CEO, Deep Focus
• Reza Aslan, Professor, Author No God But God, How to Win a Cosmic War
• Stephanie Agresta – Executive Vice President, Global Director of Digital Strategy and Social Media, Porter Novelli
• Colin Nagy – Partner, Attention
• Jamie Kantrowitz, former MySpace & MySpace Music executive
• Paul Meyer, Co-founder Voxiva
• Raquel Recuero, associate professor and researcher at Universidade Católica de Pelotas (UCPel)

In our next announcement we will share more details about the release of the report that will accompany the presentation of the ThinkSocial Awards.  The report will feature profiles of the Award winners, analysis of the most important trends in social media for public purposes, and predictions about the developments in the field to come.

Thank you again for your continuing interest and support.

Thanks to everyone who participated during the public phase of voting for the inaugural ThinkSocial Awards.

We have been delighted with the response and are excited to report that over the six days, 2,500 people cast over 7,500 votes, helping to draw attention to the incredible list of selected nominees.

In addition to the amazing number of votes, we have also been blown away by the quality of comments left on the ThinkSocial website, on Twitter and also on the Uservoice voting application.  Hearing all about the nominations directly for those of you who have experienced them first hand has been a truly inspirational part of this process.

So, what happens next?

We are working closely with our expert panel of jurors who are currently reviewing all thirty three nominations and providing their own assessment against the awards criteria.  We will combine these assessments with the public votes together with feedback from the Paley Center to make the final determination as to who should win a ThinkSocial Award.

On November 19th 2009, at The Paley Center for Media’s International Council Event, we will present three awards, recognizing outstanding examples of innovation, which represent powerful models for how social media can be used to address global problems.

We will be making an announcement regarding who won and who received special commendation very soon.   You can keep up with ThinkSocial and be the first to hear by following us on Twitter.

In case you didn’t have a chance to view the nominations you can see them all listed here: http://think-social.org/awards/final-nominees

We’re absolutely committed to keeping the conversation alive and want to hear from you.  What did you think of the nominations?  Who did we miss?  Who should we highlight and recognize in the future?  What did you think of the voting process?

Thanks again for your support and participation.